GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: A CRITICAL STUDY

THESIS

SUBMITTED

TO

GOA UNIVERSITY

FOR THE AWARD OF DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH

BY

LUCY JAMES

GUIDE: DR. K.S.BHAT

(PROFESSOR, DEPT. OF ENGLISH, GOA UNIVERSITY)

GOA UNIVERSITY

TALEIGAO PLATEAU

MAY 2017

-----------------------------------------------------
 CERTIFICATE

I hereby certify that the thesis entitled Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: A

Critical Study, submitted by Ms. Lucy James for the award of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English, has been completed under my guidance. The

thesis is a record of the research work conducted by the candidate during the

period of her study and has not previously formed the basis for the award of any

degree, diploma or certificate of this or any other University.

__________________________

Prof. K.S. Bhat,

Research Guide,

Professor, Department of English,

Goa University.
 DECLARATION

I, Ms. Lucy James, hereby declare that this thesis entitled Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak : A Critical Study, is the outcome of my own research,

undertaken under the guidance of Prof. K.S.Bhat, Professor, Department of

English, Goa University. All the sources used have been duly acknowledged in

the thesis. This work has not previously formed the basis for the award of any

degree, diploma, or certificate of this or any other university.

_________________

Lucy James
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I would like to record my deep sense of gratitude to

my Guide Prof. K.S.Bhat, Professor, Department of English, Goa

University, for not only providing the critical inputs required for this

academic work, but also for his moral and psychological support that kept

this project alive and active. Above all, it was his faith in my abilities that

motivated me to persevere and negotiate the many undecidables and aporias

encountered during the course of this study.

My thanks also goes out to Prof. Kiran Budkuley, Dr. Rafael

Fernandes and Dr. Nina Caldeira – faculty from the Department of English,

Goa University; to the Vice Chancellor’s nominee on the F.R.C. - Professor

Anuradha Wagle from the Department of French, Goa University; and, Dr.

Gopakumar - Librarian, Goa University, for their encouragement, advice,

and prompt, cheerful assistance whenever it was sought.

I am indebted to the Government of Goa for all the facilities provided

to me during the period of my study. My sincere gratitude, in particular,

goes out to Principal Bhaskar Nayak – Director of Higher Education,

 Government of Goa, for his timely facilitation in granting me ‘Study Leave’

in order to help me complete my work.

I also extend my gratitude to my colleagues in Government College of

Arts, Science & Commerce, Sanquelim, for their support and

encouragement.

Finally, I would like to thank my husband Dr. Dilip Arolkar and my

son Nikhil who have been my pillars of strength. But for their constant,

unstinted support and motivation, this work might perhaps not have been

completed...

_________________________________ _______________________________
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter No. Title Page No.

I Introduction 1

II Spivak and feminism 75

III Spivak and Marxism 91

IV Spivak and deconstruction 104

V Spivak and subaltern studies 119

VI Spivak and postcolonialism 132

VII Conclusion 151

List of works cited

Bibliography
 1

Chapter I

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Plan of the thesis

This thesis examines Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak‟s critical interventions

into feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, subaltern studies and post-

colonialism, and attempts to identify the factors that make Spivak‟s body of

work significant, relevant and unique amidst the clamour of literary theories

and theorists.

Chapter I (Introduction) comprises of the plan of the thesis, sections on

the contemporary critical scenario, a brief biography of Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak, a review of her major works, a critical review of works on Spivak,

Chapter II (Spivak and Feminism)

Spivak, in her essays: “French Feminism in an International Frame” (Spivak,

In Other Worlds) and “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”

(Spivak, "Race, Writing and Difference", 1988, pp. 243-261), argues that
 2

because of Western Feminism‟s involvement in the broader history of

European colonialism, contemporary western feminism is likely to have the

same 19th Century bourgeois colonial attitude towards Third World women.

In order to avoid this, Spivak thinks that it is necessary to challenge the

universal humanist assumption in Western Feminism that all women lead the

same kind of lives and have similar histories. Spivak‟s proposal to use

strategic essentialism in order to review and rethink feminist thought from

an entirely different perspective, i.e. that of the non-western women.

Chapter III (Spivak and Marxism)

This chapter deals with Spivak‟s reading of Marx through the lens of

deconstruction wherein she redefines the political task of the Marxist

critique as an ethical call for us to re-read Marx patiently and carefully and

underlining the importance of the economic aspect in contemporary cultural

analysis. She draws on Marx‟s idea of the ghostly presence of human labour

and links it to “…the labour of „Third World‟ women in particular which is

exploited the contemporary global capitalist economy. In doing so, Spivak

demonstrates the direct relevance of Marx‟s Labour Theory of Value to the

contemporary International Division of Labour.” (Morton, Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak,2003, p.102)

 3

Chapter IV (Spivak and Deconstruction)

This chapter examines Spivak‟s critical engagement with deconstruction.

Spivak‟s postcolonial thought has been influenced and developed by

Derrida‟s deconstruction of the western philosophical truth and also the

western humanist subject. Spivak‟s focus is on the ethical dimensions of

deconstruction. The relevance and importance of her deconstructionist

thought throw the spotlight on the ethical dimensions of her postcolonial

reading practices and her activism that is counter-global.

Chapter V (Spivak and Subaltern Studies)

The left-wing, anti-colonial writings of the Subaltern Studies collective have

a history of challenging the caste and class system in India. This chapter

deals with Spivak‟s critique of the Subaltern Studies collective. In “The

Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives” (Spivak. History and

Theory,24 (3) pp.247-72) and, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak.

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,1988, pp.271-313), Spivak

investigates subaltern women‟s stories. These writings have radically

challenged the ideas of political representation, identity and struggle of the

woman/subaltern woman.
 4

Chapter VI (Spivak and Post-colonialism)

This chapter examines Spivak‟s argument that the works of the German

philosopher Immanuel Kant, the 19th Century English literary texts, and the

institution of English literary studies, spread, encouraged and justified the

idea of English imperialism. Spivak‟s critical engagement and textual

commentaries on postcolonial fiction like that of Mahasweta Devi‟s short

stories, Jean Rhys‟ Wide Saragasso Sea and J.M.Coetzee‟s Foe, project

them as a counter-discourse in order to challenge the colonial master

narratives like Bronte‟s Jane Eyre and Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe

Chapter VII which is the concluding chapter, apart from bringing all the

loose threads together, makes an attempt to bring out the relevance of

Spivak‟s critical practice which is unique due to the fact that she has both

incorporated and transcended some of the dominant contemporary critical

theories like Marxism, Feminism and Deconstruction.

1.2 The Contemporary Critical Scenario

There was a time when the interpretation of literary texts and literary

theory seemed two different and almost unrelated things. However, in

 5

recent times, interpretation and theory have moved closer and closer to each

other. When we interpret a text we always do so from a theoretical

perspective, whether we are aware of it or not. The English educator and

poet Matthew Arnold‟s views, which enhanced the prestige of literature,

propagated the central idea that, apart from its aesthetic and pleasing

qualities, literature also had important things to teach us. Writing in the

second half of the 19th century, Arnold saw English culture as seriously

threatened by a process of secularization that had its origins in the growing

persuasiveness of scientific thinking, and by a „Philistinism‟ that was

loosened upon the world by the social rise of a self-important, money-

oriented, and utterly conventional middle class. With the spiritual comforts

of religion increasingly questionable, now that the sciences-in particular

Darwin‟s theory of evolution- had thoroughly undermined the authority of

the Bible and Church, Arnold foresaw a crucial, semi-religious role for

poetry. Arnold puts forward “Poetry” as the major embodiment of „culture‟,

which he defines in Culture and Anarchy (1869) as “the best that has been

thought and said in the world”. This culture can be found in Hellenism-the

Greek culture of antiquity, with its “aerial ease clearness and radiancy”; the

complex of intellectual and emotional attitudes expressed in the civilization

of ancient Greece. Like all University educated people of his time, Arnold
 6

was so thoroughly familiar with classical history and literature that he sees

Greek epics and plays that are more than 2000 years old as contemporary

texts. The classics and the ideal of culture that they embody are timeless for

Arnold and are the best for every age and every place. He is of course aware

that culture will always, to some extent reflect its time and place of origin.

But with regard to what it really has to tell us, it stands apart from time and

place, that is, from history. With regard to its essence, culture transcends

history. We must assume then, that its creators – the poet supreme among

them – also transcend time and place- at least as long as the act of creation

lasts. A timeless culture must be the creation of timeless minds that can at

least temporarily disregard the world around them. The poet gets his

insight/finds insights from themselves/their own mind. This view of the

individual-or „subject‟ is central to „liberal humanism‟- a

philosophical/political cluster of ideas in which the ultimate autonomy and

self-sufficiency of the subject are taken for granted. As liberal subjects, we

are not the sum of our experiences but can stand outside experience, with

our “Self” remaining inviolate and stable.

One might also argue that literature as such, contributes to the a

historical perspective that we find in liberal humanism in so far as it makes

us forget about our immediate environment. Both the „eternal‟ truths that we
 7

may find in a work of art, and its aesthetic dimension – its beauty, which

according to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) promotes disinterested

contemplation – invite us to disregard the here and now. In so doing, they

collude to give us the impression that what is most essential to us – our „self‟

– also transcends time and place.

For many present-day critics and theorists, this is a deeply

problematic view. One of the problems is that Arnold‟s „best‟ depends on

education which implicitly means that the uneducated are barbarians. Even

if we grant Arnold‟s claim and accept that his idea of culture does indeed

represent the most humane, most tolerant, most morally sensitive

perspectives that human civilization has come up with, we would still have a

problem, i.e. would we have the right to impose that culture on people who

couldn‟t care less. In short, there are serious problems with Arnold‟s

humanist conception of culture and poetry.

In the early 1920's, Eliot did what Arnold had largely avoided. He set out to

define the criteria that ‟the best that had been thought and said in world‟

would have to meet and he undertook the mission actually to identify them

in so far as they had been expressed in literary form. In other words, after

drawing up the admission requirements, he used them to establish which

texts met his criteria and which failed to do so. The canon – the list of good
 8

and even great literary works – that he set out to construe in the 1920's

would dominate virtually all English and American discussions of literature

until the 1970's and is still a powerful influence.

In the 1930s, the work of Eliot, Richards and Leavis found a warm

welcome on the other side of the Atlantic among a group of poets, including

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.

These „New Critics‟ saw poetry as a means of resisting commodification and

superficiality. In his 1937 essay “Criticism Inc.”, John Crowe Ransom tells

us that criticism „might be seriously taken in hand by professionals‟. The

New Critics and their English colleagues constituted a defensive line against

the world of vulgar commerce and amoral capitalist entrepreneurialism that

they held responsible for the moral decline of western culture. But who was

to decide which works of literature among the plenitude that the past has left

us, actually contain „the best that has been thought and said in the world‟? If

literature takes the place of religion, as Arnold had prophesied, then poets

and critics, in their mutual dependency, are the priests who spread the new

gospel. For a period of fifty years, the large majority of literary academics

on both sides of the Atlantic, saw themselves as an intellectual and moral

elite that had at its central task to safeguard „life‟, the fullness of human

experience. What was essentially an early twentieth century view of

 9

literature formed under the influence of specific historical circumstances,

became a prescription for all ages. Literary history was reshaped in the

image of the early twentieth century. Among other aspects, the required

standard was heavily gendered. Eliot‟s „wit‟, the „irony‟ of Richards and the

New Critics, and the „maturity' of Leavis all serve to underline a shared

masculinist perspective. Self-discipline, with, a controlling irony, and

related qualities are all seen as typically male, whereas overt emotions and a

refusal to intellectualize experience are seen as typically female. The female

writers elected for inclusion in the literary pantheon were admitted because

they met a male standard. Hence basically, English and American literary

studies traditionally focus on the „meaning‟ of literary texts. Practical

criticism provides interpretations, with the New Critics paying particular

attention to the formal aspects of literature, which for them contribute

directly to its meaning. Within this Anglo-American tradition, literature is

thought to be of great importance because in it we find „the best that has

been thought and said‟. Literary criticism which seeks out and preserves

the very best of what millenia of writing have to offer, functions

simultaneously as social critique. In this traditional form, literary studies

takes „liberal humanism‟ and its assumptions for granted. It sees the

individual-the subject, as not determined and defined by social and

 10

economic circumstances, but as fundamentally free. We create ourselves,

and our destiny, through the choices we make.

Inspite of the enormous influence of Eliot, Leavis and the New

Critics, our current perspectives on the study of literature owe perhaps more

to continental Europe than to England and the United States. The

continental European Tradition of literary studies that is responsible for this

begins in Russia, in the second decade of the twentieth century in Moscow

and St.Petersburg. It finds a new home in Prague in the late 1920s and

travels to France after World War II where it comes into full bloom in the

1960s and draws widespread international attention.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Russia and Czech literary

theorists worked to develop a theory of „literariness‟ where they focused on

the „formal‟ aspects of literature. The Russian Formalists suggested that

literature distinguishes itself from non-literary language because it employs

a whole range of „devices‟ that have a „defamiliarizing‟ effect. Central to

the function of these devices is the idea of „difference‟. The successors to

the Formalists, the Prague Structuralists, build on this and begin to see the

literary text as a structure of differences.

 11

Taking its clue from linguistics and –its analyses of culture and its

institutions – from structuralist anthropology, structuralism focuses on the

conditions that make meaning possible, rather than on meaning itself. What

the major approaches mentioned so far have in common is that they focus

strongly on literature itself. Conspicuously absent is a serious interest in

what many literary academics would now consider very important issues

such as the „historical situatedness‟, or historical embedment, and the

„politics‟ of literary texts. To what extent are literary texts the product of the

historical period in which they were written? The world has gone through

enormous socio-economic and political changes in the last millennium and

these changes are bound to turn up in our literature which in turn affect the

way we experience things. Can the human condition have remained

essentially the same? And what sort of view of the prevailing socio-

economic and political condition do we find in a given text? Does the text

support the status quo or does it take an openly or more implicitly critical

stance? Before the late 1960s, such questions were by the large majority of

English and American literary academics thought to be irrelevant or even

detrimental to reading and to interpretation. With only a few exceptions,

critics had not much use for historical context and even less for politics.

However, some of the major modes of political criticism that became a

 12

forceful presence in Anglo-American literary studies in the course of the

1970s are Marxism, Feminism and Criticism that concerns itself with racial

relations. In Marxist criticism „social class‟ and „class-relations‟ function as

central instruments of analysis; in feminist criticism, the concept of „gender‟

is the crucial critical and political instrument; while in criticism concerned

with racial relations, the fundamental category is „race‟. Later, Literary

Theory and criticism went through great changes under the impact of the

literary-theoretical upheavals of the later 1970s and the 1980s and the

spectacular rise of poststructuralism.

Poststructuralism is a continuation and simultaneous rejection of

structuralism, both literary and the Levi-Strauss anthropological ones. In

France, where it originates, poststructuralism is generally subsumed under

structuralism with both being broadly anti-humanist and linguistically

oriented. The poststructuralism of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida

(1930) or „Deconstruction‟, as it is often called, was the first version of

poststructuralism to reach the United States. Spreading from there, it had

enormous impact on English and American literary studies in general. By

the late 1970s, other poststructuralist thinkers, notably, the French historian

Michel Foucault (1926-1984), had caught the attention of literary academics.

 13

Poststructuralism continues Structuralism‟s strongly anti-humanist

perspective and it closely follows Structuralism in its belief that language is

the key to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Poststructuralism,

however, simultaneously undermines Structuralism by thoroughly

questioning –“deconstructing”- some of its major assumptions and the

methods that derive from those assumptions. It questions the Structuralists‟

faith in language and in objective analysis it seriously undermines

Structuralism‟s achievements. In its deconstructionist form, primarily

associated with Jacques Derrida, it focuses on language and argues that

language, even if we have no alternative, is a fundamentally unstable and

unreliable medium of communication. Because we rely on language in

articulating our perception of reality and in formulating our knowledge of

that reality, human perception and knowledge are fundamentally flawed. In

a related move, post-structuralism argues that we have no genuine

knowledge of our „self‟, and that our identity, too, is prey to the

indeterminacy of language. The deconstructionist criticism that bases itself

upon these and other arguments shows how the instability of language

always undoes the apparent coherence of literary texts. The postmodern

stories and novels that begin to appear in the 1960s and continue to be

written in the 1970s and 1980s have already dispensed with that coherence.
 14

Through the techniques and strategies that they employ, they too raise issues

of language, identity, and so on. The postmodern criticism that responds to

this mode or writing accepts its premises and links it to poststructuralist

theory.

In the course of the 1970s and the 1980s, literary studies began to

incorporate the thought of the poststructuralist historian Michel Foucault and

the poststructuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Foucault‟s work calls our

attention to the role of language in the exercise and preservation of power.

According to Foucault, the modern western world is in the grip of so-called

„discourses‟ that regulate our behaviour because we have internalised them

and for all practical purposes police ourselves. Foucauldian criticism

focuses on the role of literary and other texts in the circulation and

maintenance of social power. Lacan‟s psychoanalytic theories serve to

explain why we would internalize discourses that effectively imprison us.

Lacanian criticism has been especially illuminating with regard to the

relationship that readers enter into with the texts they read.

After assimilation of poststructuralist theory, literary criticism

increasingly begins to see literature as an integral part of a much wider

cultural context. Initially in the field of Renaissance studies, but later on in

literary studies in general, critics start from the assumption that literary texts
 15

are inevitably situated within the sort of discourses that, according to

Foucault, carry and maintain social power. The American new historicists

and the British Cultural materialists read literary texts for their role in the

circulation of power, with the British critics having an additional interest in

signs of genuine dissidence and in the usually conservative roles that cultural

icons such as Shakespeare have been made to play in later times. In order to

bring to light the political dimension of literary texts, new historicists and

cultural materialists often read them in connection with non-literary texts

and with reference to the dominant discourse or discourses of a given period.

In the 1920s and 1930s, during the Harlem Renaissance, and with the

introduction of the concept of negritude, „race‟ began to be a factor of

importance in literary studies. Refusing to be defined on the basis of race,

by the dominant white culture, African-American and French-speaking

writers from Africa and the Caribbean began to define themselves and their

culture in their own terms. The desire for cultural self-determination, that is,

for cultural independence, is one of the moving forces behind the literatures,

that in the 1960s and 1970s, spring up in the former colonies. The desire to

draw directly on one‟s own culture is defended vigorously in an essay called

„Colonialist Criticism‟ (1974) in which Chinua Achebe argued that the

„universal‟ qualities that western criticism expects from literature are not so
 16

much „universal‟ as „European‟ in a universal disguise. He attacks the idea

that literary art should transcend its time and place. When, in the later 1960s

it first became clear that the former colonies were busy producing literatures

of their own, the idea that „English literature‟ was mutating into „literatures

in English‟ of which the literary production of England was only one –

although important, was still unthinkable. Instead, English critics interested

in the writings that came out of the former colonies developed the idea of a

„Commonwealth literature‟: the English-language literature of the

dependencies and former colonies that, with Great Britain as its centre,

formed the so-called Commonwealth of Nations, or British Commonwealth.

With hindsight, it can be seen that the idea of a Commonwealth literature

followed the hierarchy of the political Commonwealth in that it placed the

literature of Great Britain at the centre of this otherwise rather loose

configuration. Thus, English literature and English criticism set the norm. In

its early stages, the study of Commonwealth literature was traditionally

humanistic. The liberal humanist approach to English literature believed

that it had universal validity because it drew on an unchanging, universal

human condition, and was therefore, without much further thought, applied

to the work of writers ranging from Jamaica to Nigeria and from India to

New Zealand. Moreover, the perspective of this liberal humanism was

 17

specifically English. No matter how different writers from say, New

Zealand and Trinidad might be, what they were supposed to have in

common was the heritage of English Literature. At that time, admission to

the ranks of English Literature might for writers from former colonies like

Australia or Canada still have counted as an official stamp of approval.

However, African, Asian and Caribbean Commonwealth writers were on the

whole not happy with the Western or “Eurocentric” perspective of

Commonwealth criticism, not in the least because their memories of British

colonial rule had not invariably convinced them of European civilization‟s

humanistic superiority. In the course of the 1970s, their objections - voiced

in Achebe‟s „colonialist Criticism and other critiques – began to find a

serious echo in the writings of a number of British literary academics who

had themselves begun to question the supposedly universal validity of

humanist values. These critics argued that, first of all, overseas writers must

be seen within the specific context of the culture they were part of and which

informed their writing, and that secondly, that culture was not necessarily

inferior to, but only different from, the cultures of the mother country. Some

critics even argued that the relationship between the former colonial powers

and their colonies could most rewardingly be analysed with the help of

Marxist concepts (with the colonized as the oppressed class) and that the
 18

role of literature should therefore also be considered from a Marxist

perspective, that it is the vehicle of ideology. Looked at from this

perspective, not only the literatures of other Commonwealth nations but also

English literature itself, begin to appear in a new light. English literature

was, in the course of the nineteenth century, introduced in colonial India in

order to „civilize‟ the colonized elite. It is not implausible to suppose that

the literature of the colonisers had indeed played a substantial ideological

role in the process of colonization. From this perspective the work of

commonwealth writers will be read as either involved in an ideological

struggle with (neo)colonial forces or else ideologically complicit with them

(V.S. Naipaul & Salman Rushdie).

Commonwealth literary studies made little difference between English

literature and the new literature from overseas. The same holds true for the

Marxist approach that developed in the course of the 1970's. From the

perspective of the Nigerian or Pakistani writers, Marxism, although

fundamentally at odds with liberal humanism, is also alien to their own

culture. The emphasis on class in Marxist Commonwealth studies has been

a valuable contribution, but in its focus on class, Marxism too was not much

interested in the specific cultural context from which a given literary text
 19

emerged. With hindsight, it is easy to see to what extent the field of

Commonwealth literary studies was still marked by “Eurocentricism”.

In the course of the 1980s, Commonwealth literary studies became

part of the then emerging and now vast field of literary, cultural, political,

and historical enquiry that we call postcolonial studies. In the process, it

was radically transformed. Whereas Commonwealth studies tacitly assumed

common ground between the cultural products of the former colonies and

the culture of the metropolis, postcolonial theory and criticism emphasizes

the tension between the metropolis and the (former) colonies, between what

within the colonial framework were the metropolitan, imperial centre and its

colonial satellites. It focuses on the cultural displacement – and its

consequences for personal and communal identities – that inevitably

followed colonial conquest and rule and it does so from a non-Eurocentric

perspective. Postcolonial theory and criticism radically questions the

aggressively expansionist imperialism of the colonizing powers and in

particular the system of values that supported imperialism and that it sees as

still dominant within the western world. It studies the process and the

effects of cultural displacement and the ways in which the displaced have

culturally defended themselves. Postcolonial theory, in particular, sees such

displacements, and the ambivalences and hybrid cultural forms to which

 20

they lead, as vantage points that allow us to expose the internal doubts and

the instances of resistance that the West has suppressed in its steamrolling

globalizing course and to deconstruct the seamless façade that the

combination of imperialism and capitalism has traditionally striven to

present. The postcolonial perspective, just like that of “the marginal” in

general, is a „substantial intervention into those justifications of modernity-

progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past –

that rationalize the authoritarian, “normalizing” tendencies within cultures in

the name of national interest” (Homi Bhabha 1990: 4). For Bhabha, one of

the most prominent postcolonial theorists, the postcolonial perspective has

that disruptive potential because the effects of colonialism have in a curious

way foreshadowed current post-structuralist views and concerns.

Postcolonial studies in its current theoretically oriented form starts

with the publication, in 1978, of the Palestinian-American critic Edward

Said‟s book Orientalism. Drawing on Foucault and, to a lesser extent,

Gramsci, Said‟s study completely changed the agenda of the study of non-

western cultures and their literatures and pushed it in the direction of what

we now call postcolonial theory. Orientalism is a devastating critique of how

through the ages, but particularly in the 19 th century – the heyday of

imperialist expansion – which is Said‟s book's focus, Western texts have

 21

represented the East, and more specifically the Islamic Middle East. Using

British and French „Scholarly' works…works of literature, political tracts,

journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological studies; Said

examines how these texts „construct‟ the Orient through imaginative

representations, through seemingly factual descriptions, and through claims

to knowledge about Oriental history and culture. Together, all these forms

of western writing form a Foucauldian discourse – a loose system of

statements and claims that constitutes a field of supposed knowledge and

through which that “knowledge” is constructed. Such discourses, although

seemingly interested in knowledge, always establish relationships of power.

In Foucault‟s work, power is first of all a force that serves itself. We may

think we use it for our own purposes in our capacity as free agents, but in

reality it works first of all „through‟ us and not „for‟ us. From Foucault's

anti-humanistic perspective we are functions within networks of power. For

Said, however, the West‟s representations of the East ultimately work within

the framework of a conscious and determined effort at subordination. For

Said, Orientalism – this discourse about the Orient – has traditionally served

hegemonic purposes. As is seen, Gramsci thought of „hegemony‟ as

domination by consent – the way the ruling class succeeds in oppressing

other classes with their apparent approval. In Gramsci‟s analysis it does so

 22

through culture: the ruling class makes its own values and interests central

in what it presents as a common, neutral, culture. Accepting that „common‟

culture, the other classes become complicit in their own oppression and the

result is a kind of velvet domination. Thus, Orientalism has traditionally

served two purposes. It has legitimized western expansionism and

imperialism in the eyes of Western governments and their electorates and it

has insidiously worked to convince the „natives‟ that western culture

represented universal civilization. Accepting that culture could only benefit

them – it would, for instance, elevate them from the „backward‟ or

„superstitious‟ conditions in which they still lived – and would make them

participants in the most advanced civilization the world had ever seen. For

Said, Western representations of the Orient, no matter how well intentioned,

have always been part of this damaging discourse and have been complicit

with the workings of western power. “Orientalism” revolutionised the way

western scholars and critics looked at representations of non-western

subjects and cultures. Said‟s book also drew attention to the way in which

the discourse of Orientalism serves to create the West as well as it creates

the East. “Orientalism” offered a challenging theoretical framework and a

new perspective on the interpretation of western writing about the East (and

other non-Western cultures) and of writing produced under colonial rule. It

 23

put the role of the West‟s cultural institutions (the University, literary

writing, newspapers, etc.) in its military, economic, and cultural domination

of non-western nations and peoples firmly on the agenda and asked

questions that we still ask concerning literature‟s role in past and present

racial, ethnic, and cultural encounters.

One of the questions that Said does not address but that is central to

the work of Homi Bhabha is what actually happens in the cultural interaction

between colonizer and colonized. For Bhabha, the encounter affects both.

The most influential of Bhabha‟s contributions to postcolonial theory is his

notion of „hybridity‟. Shifting his focus from „the noisy command of

colonial authority‟ and „the silent repression of native traditions‟ , to „the

colonial hybrid‟, Bhabha argues that the cultural interaction of colonizer and

colonized leads to a fusion of cultural forms that from one perspective,

because it signals its „productivity‟, confirms the power of the colonial

presence, but that as a form of mimicry simultaneously „unsettles the

mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power‟ (Bhabha, H. The

Location of Culture 1994, p. 112). Hybridity „intervenes in the exercise of

authority not merely to indicate the impossibility of its identity but to

represent the unpredictability of it presence‟. Whereas Said prompts us to

question western representations of the East, Bhabha asks us to submit the

 24

actual encounter between West and East – in his case India – to the closest

scrutiny. Postcolonial Marxists such as Aijaz Ahmad have suggested that

Bhabha and other “Westernized” non-Europeans are hardly in the best

position to speak for the colonized and neo-colonized masses.

Amidst these diverse points of view and schools of thought, stands the

towering figure of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a literary theorist and critic,

and one of the few academics who can claim to have influenced intellectual

production on a truly global scale. Spivak, unlike the others mentioned in

the previous paragraph, has no trouble admitting that her position as an

academic working in the West separates her from the masses of India, her

country of origin. At the same time, she has drawn our attention to that large

majority of the colonised that has left no mark upon history because it could

not, or was not allowed to, make itself heard. Millions and millions have

come and gone under the colonial dispensation without leaving a trace: men,

but even more so women. Since colonised women went unheard within their

own patriarchal culture, they were doubly unheard under a colonial regime.

Spivak can be said to be the first postcolonial theorist with a fully feminist

agenda that includes the complicity of female writers with imperialism. „It

should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British fiction without

remembering that imperialism, understood as England‟s social mission, was

 25

a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English‟,

Spivak tells us in her 1985 essay “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism” (Spivak. 1995, p. 269). Noting that the role of literature in the

production of cultural representation should not be ignored‟, she goes on to

analyse Charlotte Bronte‟s Jane Eyre (1847) and the way in which it

presents the Creole Bertha Mason- Rochester‟s mad wife – in terms of

cultural representation. Spivak‟s insistence on the importance of feminist

perspectives is part of a larger role that she has perhaps unintentionally

played over the last two decades: that of the theoretical conscience of the

postcolonial studies. Spivak represents the voice of difference among the

major postcolonial theorists. Said and Bhabha virtually ignore the question

of difference. Both are gender blind and also largely ignore cultural

difference. They make no difference between the various European

cultures- Protestant or Catholic, liberal or authoritarian. Spivak, however,

tries to be attentive to difference or heterogeneity, even within feminism

itself she has taken to task Western Feminism for operating within a horizon

determined by white, middle-class, and heterosexual preoccupations. Spivak

also focuses on social class as an analytical category. Of all postcolonial

theorists, Spivak has most consistently focused on the subaltern (the

category of those who are lower in position or rank). Spivak employs the
 26

term (which derives from Gramsci) to describe the lower layers of colonial

and postcolonial/neo-colonial society: the homeless, the unemployed, the

subsistence farmers, the day-labourers, etc. She is aware, however, that

categorizations by way of class, too, tend to make difference invisible: “one

must nevertheless insist that the colonised subaltern subject is irretrievably

heterogeneous” (Spivak. “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism”, Critical Inquiry 12(1) pp. 243-61 ). One result of this

attentiveness to difference is Spivak‟s focus on the female subaltern, a very

large and differentiated category among the colonised that, she argues, has

traditionally been doubly marginalized: “If, in the context of colonial

production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as

female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak. “Three Women‟s Texts and

a Critique of Imperialism” Critical Inquiry 12(1) pp. 243-61). This focus

does not mean that she speaks for – or has the intention of speaking for the

female subaltern. Rather, she is motivated by the desire to save the female

subaltern from misrepresentation. In her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern

Speak?”, Spivak, in the wider context of a critique of what she sees as

poststructuralist appropriations of the colonial subject, examines the

nineteenth-century controversy between the colonized Indians and their

British colonizers over what she calls „Widow-sacrifice‟: the burning of

 27

widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands (Spivak. “Can the

Subaltern Speak” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (eds), Cary

Nelson and Larrry Grossberg , 1988, pp. 271-313), Spivak concludes that

neither party allowed women-the potential victims of this practice-to speak.

The British texts construct a position for the woman in which she is made to

represent western individualism and, by implication, a superior western

civilization that emphasizes freedom, while the Indian ones present her as

choosing for duty and tradition. Although both parties claim that they have

them on their side, the women themselves remain unheard.

Spivak combines a Marxist perspective – the emphasis on class as a

differentiating factor – with a deconstructionist approach to texts and to

identity. In dealing with colonialist texts she tries to demonstrate how they

attain their coherence by setting up false oppositions between a supposed

centre and an equally fictive margin and how their language invariably

deconstructs the coherence they try to establish. Given this deconstructionist

perspective, Spivak cannot very well escape the conclusion that our identity

is without a fixed centre and inherently unstable. In one way such a

decentred identity serves Spivak‟s purpose well since it radically undermines

all essentialist pretensions on the part of the colonizer and neo-colonizer and

it equally undermines the postcolonial fundamentalism that she has little

 28

political patience with. In her analyses of, and attack on, forms of renascent

essentialism, she also acts as postcolonial theory‟s theoretical conscience.

On the other hand, decolonized nations and cultures, just like the political

movements of the decolonised, arguably need some sort of identity that does

not immediately deconstruct itself and announce to the world that it is

ungrounded and decentred. Spivak‟s solution to this dilemma is what she

calls a „strategic use of positivist essentialism‟ that clearly signals its

political agenda. In other words, it is all right to project a stable political or

cultural identity as long as we are aware that it is a construction that is

always under deconstructionist erasure. Currently, postcolonial studies

(theory and criticism), generally emphasizes plurality, differentiality, and

hybridity without the exaggerated totalizing claims that marked its earlier

phase.

1.3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: life and context

Like the work of other leading „postcolonial intellectuals‟, including

Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, Spivak‟s thought is self-consciously

marked by her diasporic location and cultural background. Her work often

draws on autobiographical information to illustrate and clarify her arguments

and at times also stands in for an engagement with the more urgent political

concerns she frequently invokes, such as the plight of disenfranchised,

 29

„subaltern‟ groups living in the global South. Yet such an argument

overlooks the significance of Spivak‟s intellectual biography to an

understanding of her own writing and theoretical affiliations.

Gayatri Chakravorty was born in Calcutta on 24th February 1942, the

year of the artificial famine in India and five years before India gained

independence from British colonial rule. The artificial famine was created

by the British military in India as a ruse to feed the allied forces in the

Pacific during the Second World War. Although it was illegal to protest

against the famine, a group of Indian radicals had found a way to actively

demonstrate against the British rule through performance and street theatre.

By forming a group known as the Indian People‟s Theatre Association

(IPTA), these non-professional actors and directors used theatre as a medium

through which to promote nationalist sentiment. It was this political context

in pre-independence Calcutta that shaped Spivak‟s earliest childhood

experience: as she states in an interview with Alfred Arteaga, her earliest

childhood memories are of the songs and plays performed by the IPTA (The

Spivak Reader,16). Spivak came from a middle-class Hindu family and

attended a missionary school in Calcutta, where she was taught by tribal

Christians, who were „lower than middle class by origin, neither Hindus nor

Muslims, not even Hindu untouchable, but tribals – so called aboriginals –

 30

who had been converted by missionaries‟ (The Spivak Reader,17). This

early experience of being taught by women „who were absolutely

underpriveleged, but who had dehegemonized Christianity in order to

occupy a social space where they could teach their social superiors‟ (The

Spivak Reader,16) has continued to mark the trajectory of Spivak‟s work.

Spivak graduated from Presidency College of the University of

Calcutta in 1959 with a first-class Honours degree in English, including gold

medals for English and Bengali literature. The teaching of the English

literary canon in Indian universities could be seen to continue the ideological

legacy of British colonial education policies which were intended to instruct

and enlighten the Indian middle class in the morally and politically superior

culture of the British. Indeed, during the 1950's, degree requirements at the

University of Calcutta „amounted to a comprehensive first-hand reading

knowledge of all literature in “English” from just before Chaucer up to the

mid-twentieth century, with a special focus on Shakespeare‟ (The Spivak

Reader, Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean(eds), pp.1-2). Yet, although

Presidency College was well known for its academic excellence and

traditional curriculum, the social demography of its students was mixed.

The influence of the college‟s politically active intellectual Left can be seen
 31

to mark the trajectory of Spivak‟s published work from the early 1980‟s to

the present.

After taking a Master‟s degree in English at Cornell University,

Ithaca, New York State, and a year‟s fellowship at Girton College,

Cambridge, Spivak took up an instructor‟s position at the University of

Iowa. While at Iowa she completed her doctoral dissertation on the work of

William Butler Yeats, which was supervised by the literary critic Paul de

Man at Cornell. This was subsequently developed into a book entitled

Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B.Yeats (1974). At first

glance, this book offers a fairly conventional reading of the Irish writer‟s

life, poetry and his reinvention of Celtic mythology. Yet it also situates

Yeats‟ work in terms of the history of British colonialism in Ireland. In this

respect, Spivak‟s early text could be seen to anticipate the rise of

postcolonial literary criticism, and the influence of Yeats‟ work on other

anti-colonial writers such as the Nigerian Chinua Achebe and the West

Indian Derek Walcott.

She married and divorced an American, Talbot Spivak, but has kept

his surname, under which her work first appeared in print. She currently

holds the Avalon Foundation Professorship of the Humanities at Columbia

University. Today, Spivak is among the foremost feminist critics who have
 32

achieved international eminence and one of the few who can claim to have

influenced intellectual production on a truly global scale. In addition to the

groundbreaking translation of Jacques Derrida‟s Of Grammatology, Spivak

has published four books, a volume of interviews, and numerous theoretical

and critical articles.

Particularly in the United States, where Spivak has made her

academic career, there has been within the various women‟s movements a

strong populist impulse that has encouraged feminist critics and intellectuals

to keep their work accessible to general audiences. Inspite of this pressure,

and the anti-intellectual tendencies of U.S. culture generally, Spivak has

relentlessly challenged the high ground of established philosophical

discourse. She has done so in difficult theoretical language, and on grounds

recognizable to philosophers, especially those trained in the traditions of

continental philosophy. Although her own primary training was in literary

criticism, Spivak has a command of philosophy and ethics, as well as

political economy and social theory. Thus she has been able to challenge the

practitioners of the academic disciplines of philosophy and history in the

United States, Britain, India, and elsewhere in terms that, if not exactly their

own, are nevertheless recognizable; terms that specifically explore the

margins at which disciplinary discourses break down and enter the world of
 33

political agency. The range of this challenge has made her work seem

remote and difficult to some readers, and she has been controversially

received by academic philosophers, historians, literary scholars, and elite

Indianists, especially those antagonistic to deconstruction, post-

structuralism, subaltern studies, and post-1968 French thinking with which

her work often engages.

However, one must not assume that Spivak‟s work is so esoteric that she has

no audience outside the academy. Her career has followed a complex

intellectual trajectory through a deeply feminist perspective on

deconstruction, the Marxist critique of capital and the international division

of labor, the critique of imperialism and colonial discourse, and the critique

of race in relation to nationality, ethnicity, the status of the migrant, and

what it might mean to identify a nation or a cultural form as postcolonial in a

neocolonial world. This intellectual trajectory has gained for Spivak a

relatively heterogeneous international audience.

Despite the difficulties that some readers have experienced with her

ideas and writings, Spivak‟s contributions to the critical investigation of

literary and cultural theory have been widely recognized within the U.S.

academy. Since the late 1970s her reputation has become increasingly

international as well. Spivak has held visiting university appointments in

 34

France, India, and Saudi Arabia, and has lectured extensively throughout the

U.K., U.S., Australia, Canada, the Indian subcontinent, Belgium, Eire,

Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, South Africa,

Sweden, Taiwan, the former Yugoslavia, and before the European

Parliament in Strasbourg. Her sustained critical engagement with the

intellectual tradition represented by the writings of Freud, Lacan, Marx,

Derrida, and Foucault has been instrumental in transforming and politicizing

the reception of the feminist and poststructuralist critiques of psychoanalytic

and Marxist thought. Moreover, her wide-ranging critical and theoretical

challenges continue to influence the development of multicultural studies,

postcolonial studies, and feminist theory not only in the U.S., but also

internationally.

1.4. A review of Spivak's major works.

In 1976 Of Grammatology, an English translation of the French philosopher

Jacques Derrida‟s de la grammatologie (1967) was published. Besides

introducing this influential thinker to English-speaking audiences, Spivak‟s

“Translator‟s Preface” set a new standard for self-reflexivity in prefaces and

introductions. It addressed, from every conceivable angle, the “question of

the preface” and what it meant to translate and explicate the work of

Derrida, who developed the form of a philosophical critique known as

 35

deconstruction. In her “Preface,” Spivak briefly introduced Derrida, the

man or biographical subject, and Derrida, the collection of published

writings, before turning to the question of the preface as a form „of‟ writing

and an occasion or event „in‟ writing, with particular protocols to be

observed. This attention to the particular protocols of specific occasions is

one of the characteristic gestures of deconstruction. It is this translation with

a critical introduction of Derrida‟s de la grammatologie that launched

Spivak‟s reputation as a theorist of deconstruction.

“Can The Subaltern Speak? : Speculations on Widow Sacrifice”

(Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak” in Marxism and the Interpretation of

Culture, (eds), Cary Nelson and Larrry Grossberg , 1988, pp. 271-313), is

the essay that is perhaps most widely known, read and cited. Here, Spivak

describes the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a young Bengali

woman that indicate a failed attempt at self-representation. Because her

attempt at “speaking” outside normal patriarchal channels was not

understood or supported, Spivak concluded that “the subaltern cannot

speak.” (Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak” in Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture, (eds), Cary Nelson and Larrry Grossberg , 1988,

pp. 271-313) . Her extremely nuanced argument, admittedly confounded by

her sometimes opaque style, led some incautious readers to accuse her of
 36

phallocentric complicity, of not recognizing or even not letting the subaltern

speak. Some critics, missing the point, buttressed their arguments with

anecdotal evidence of messages cried out by burning widows. Her point was

not that the subaltern does not cry out in various ways, but that speaking is

“a transaction between speaker and listener” (“Subaltern Talk”, The Spivak

Reader, Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean(eds), pp.287-308). Subaltern

talk, in other words, does not achieve the dialogic level of utterance.

Beyond this specific misunderstanding, Spivak in an interview with Leon

De Kock, objects to the frivolous use of the term „subaltern‟ and its

appropriation by other groups who may be marginalized, but are not

specifically “subaltern”. “Everybody thinks the „subaltern‟ is just a classy

word for oppressed, for Other, for somebody who‟s not getting a piece of

the pie” (Spivak, New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa,1992).

She points out that in Gramsci‟s original covert usage (being obliged to

encrypt his writing to get it past prison censors), it signified “proletarian”,

whose voice could not be heard, being structurally written out of the

capitalist bourgeois narrative. In postcolonial terms, “everything that has

limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern – a space of

difference. Now who would say that‟s just the oppressed? The working

class is oppressed. It is not subaltern”. (Spivak, New Nation Writers

 37

Conference in South Africa, 1992). Another misreading of the concept is

that, since the subaltern cannot speak, she needs an advocate to speak for

her, a Horton to its Who – affirmative action or special regulatory

protection. Spivak objects, “Who the hell wants to protect subalternity?

Only extremely reactionary, dubious anthropologistic museumizers. No

activist wants to keep the subaltern in the space of difference…You don‟t

give the subaltern voice. You work for the bloody subaltern, you work

against subalternity” (Spivak, New Nation Writers Conference in South

Africa, 1992). She cites the work of the Subaltern Studies group as an

example of how this critical work can be practiced, not to give the subaltern

voice, but to clear the space to allow it to speak.

Spivak is particularly leery of the misappropriation of the term by those who

simply want to claim disenfranchisement within the system of hegemonic

discourse, i.e. those who can speak, but feel they are not being given their

turn. “Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least

interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-

against minority on the university campus, they don‟t need the word

„subaltern‟…They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are.

They‟re within the hegemonic discourse wanting a piece of the pie and not

being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should
 38

not call themselves subaltern.” (Spivak, New Nation Writers Conference in

South Africa, 1992).

The essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” is Spivak‟s critique of western

models of class-consciousness and subjectivity where she juxtaposes the

radical claims of twentieth-century French intellectuals such as Michel

Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to speak for the disenfranchised and the self-

righteous claims of British colonialism to rescue native women from the

practice of Hindu widow sacrifice in nineteenth-century India. The point of

this juxtaposition is to emphasise how the benevolent, radical western

intellectual can paradoxically silence the subaltern by claiming to represent

and speak for their experience, in the same way that the benevolent

colonialist silenced the voice of the widow, who „chooses‟ to die on her

husband‟s funeral pyre. In both these examples, the benevolent impulse to

represent subaltern groups effectively appropriates the voice of the subaltern

and thereby silences them.

In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak foregrounds the aesthetic

and political dimensions of representation to mark the difference between

her own role as postcolonial intellectual and the concrete, material lives of

the subaltern. In doing so , Spivak has produced a better reading strategy

 39

that responds to the voices and unwritten histories of subaltern women,

without speaking for them.

Spivak‟s account of Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri‟s suicide

in the re-worked version of „Can the Subaltern Speak?‟ published in chapter

3 of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, exemplifies how some armed

anticolonial nationalist struggles were predicated on the foreclosure of the

subaltern woman. In Spivak‟s account, Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri „hanged

herself in her father‟s modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926‟ but

attempted to cover up her involvement with an armed resistance movement

through an elaborate suicide ritual that resembled the ancient practice of

Hindu widow sacrifice. “Nearly a decade later it was discovered that she

was a member of one of the many groups involved in the armed struggle for

Indian independence” (Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak”). Significantly,

Spivak has emphasized that the action of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri was

inscribed in her body, but „even that incredible effort to speak did not fulfill

itself in a speech act‟ (The Spivak Reader, Donna Landry and Gerald

Maclean(eds), p. 289). By retroactively framing Bhubaneswari‟s suicide as

an embodied act, Spivak clarifies her frequently misunderstood argument

that the subaltern cannot speak. Moreover, such a statement exemplifies

 40

how the sovereign political acts of women are often not intelligible within

the patriarchal logic of the state.

In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics' (1987) is another of Spivak‟s

well known and widely distributed book. Here, she “analyzes the

relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-

Western contexts. She develops an original integration of the methodologies

of deconstruction, Marxism and feminism which becomes a valuable tool for

studying our own and other worlds”. Much of the force of Spivak‟s work

comes from its reiterated demonstration that the three fields/methodologies,

namely, Marxism, feminism and deconstruction, can only be understood and

used in a constant attention to their interpenetration and re-articulation. The

texts included in this work are of importance to anyone concerned with the

relation of both culture and its interpretation to the other practices that shape

our lives.

One of the great virtues of these essays is the commitment to teaching and

education that runs through them. Spivak is rare in combining an

understanding of many of the most crucial problems facing the globe and the

species with an interest in considering the detailed questions of specific

educational situations. From the lofty heights of the development of

imperialism, the study of sexuality, and the impossibility of representing

 41

Being to discussing the mundane merits of differing composition courses

may seem like a fall from the sublime to the ridiculous. It is one of the

delights of this book that it shirks from neither: “I think less easily of

„changing the world‟ than in the past. I teach a small number of the holders

of the can(n)on male or female, feminist or masculist, how to read their own

texts, as best I can.” Any reader of these texts of Spivak will be better able

to construe and construct the contradictory texts that constitute their own

lives. (Foreword to In Other Worlds)

The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, (1990), is a

collection of 12 interviews with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published

and/or broadcast in Australia, Canada, India, the United States and Britain,

between 1984 and 1988. The collection brings together discussions of some

of the most compelling politico-theoretical issues broached in Spivak‟s work

and confronting political thinkers today. The questions deliberated include

the problem of representation, self-representation and representing others;

the politicization of deconstruction; post-colonialism and the politics of

multi-culturalism; the situations of post-colonial critics; speech-act and

critical theory; pedagogical responsibility; and political strategies, as well as

many other timely issues.

 42

Yet, these interviews between Gayatri Spivak and her interlocutors do not

merely record objective dialogues, nor do they simply delineate politico-

theoretical positions. Indeed, the idea of a “neutral dialogue,” as Gayatri

Spivak points out in her interview with Rashmi Bhatnagar, Lola Chatterjee,

and Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, “denies history, denies structure, denies the

positioning of subjects;” One must learn to read how desire for neutrality

and/or desire for the Other articulates itself. One must learn to read the text-

the narrative, historical and institutional structures-in which desire is written.

Spivak not only responds to questions posed by commenting upon and

situating the question in relation to her work (a significant offering in itself);

she, at the same time, attempts to render visible the historical and

institutional structures of the representative space from which she is called to

speak, be it as a spokeswoman for deconstruction, Marxism, feminism or the

“Third World” point of view. By using the interview questions to come to

terms with and to accentuate the problem of representation and constitution

of the subject, Spivak turns her responses into lessons in critical reading.

Each interview is both a lesson to be read and a lesson in reading as we learn

the slow and careful labor of unlearning our privileges as our loss.

The Post-Colonial Critic:Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, Sarah

Harasym(ed), 1990, comprises of the following interviews:

 43

1. “Criticism, Feminism, and The Institution”.

In June, 1984, Gayatri Spivak visited Australia as one of the guest

speakers of the Future Fall Conference, a conference on Post-

Modernity held in Sydney. This interview with Elizabeth Grosz was

recorded in Sydney on August 17, 1984 and was first published in

Thesis Eleven, No. 10/11, 1984/85.

2. “The Post-modern Condition: The End of Politics?”

This interview is a transcript of a discussion between Geoffrey

Hawthor, host for the 1984 Channel 4 Voices series, Knowledge in

Crisis, Gayatri Spivak, Ron Aronson and John Dunn.

3. “Strategy, Identity, Writing”

This is an edited transcript of a three-hour interview conducted in

Canberra, Australia, on August 17, 1986. The participants were John

Hutnyk, Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Gayatri Spivak. It

was first published in Melbourne Journal of Politics, Vol. 18,

1986/87.

4. “The Problem of Cultural Self-representation”

This interview between Gayatri Spivak and Walter Adamson was

recorded in 1986 and was first published in Thesis Eleven, No.15,

1986.
 44

5. “Questions of Multi-culturalism”

This discussion between Sneja Gunew and Gayatri Spivak concerning

the post-colonialism, anti-imperialism and multi-cultural politics in

Australia was first published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal

of Women’s Liberation, Vol. 12, No. 1/2, 1986. This interview as

originally broadcast on ABC Radio National on Saturday, August 30,

1986, in “The Minders” series, produced by Penny O‟Donnel and Ed

Brunetti.

6. “The Post-colonial Critic”

In 1987, Gayatri Spivak held a visiting professorship at the Centre for

Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where

she offered a course entitled “Texts and Contexts: Theories of

Interpretation,” which focused on recent post-structuralist European

theories, chiefly those of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard,

Habermas and Lacan. She also delivered several lectures at various

centres in Delhi University. Rashmi Bhatnagar, Lola Chatterjee and

Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan focused their interview with Gayatri Spivak

on four broad areas: the situation of the post-colonial intellectual, first

world theory, the women‟s movement and the study of English

 45

literature. It was first published in The Book Review, Vol 11, No.3,

1987.

7. “Postmarked Calcutta, India”

This discussion concerning the problems of representation, self-

representation and representing others, and the situation of the post-

colonial subject between Angela Ingram and Gayatri Spivak was

recorded in November, 1987, upon Gayatri Spivak‟s return from her

visiting professorship at the Centre for Historical Studies at

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. It was first published in

Women’s writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela

Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)

8. “Practical Politics of The Open End”

This interview was recorded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where

Gayatri Spivak was an Andrew Mellon Professor of English, on

October 31/November 1, 1987 First published in Canadian Journal of

Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et

sociale, Vol.12, No. 1-2, 1988.

9. “The Intervention Interview”

 46

This was first published in the Southern Humanities Review, Fall

1988, the following interview with Gayatri Spivak was secured by

Terry Threadgold, Department of English, and Peter Hutchings of the

Intervention Collective, both of the University of Sydney, Australia.

The occasion was the 1985 Cultural Constructon of Race Conference

in Sydney, which Professor Spivak attended as a guest speaker. The

questions posed in the interview, though inspired by the conference,

were delivered in writing after the conference and read, in the interests

of recreating the situation of an interview, by Frances Bartkowski of

Wesleyan University.

10.“ Interview with Radical Philosophy”

In November 1988, Gayatri Spivak visited England to participate in

the Radical Philosophy Conference, “Politics, Reason and Hope” An

edited version of the interview between Peter Osborne, Jonathan Ree

and Gayatri Spivak appeared in Radical Philosophy 54 (Spring 1990).

11. “Negotiating the Structures of Violence”

This interview was conducted on September 26, 1987, in Durham,

N.C., where Gayatri Spivak was participant at the Convergence in

Crisis: Narratives of the History of Theory conference at the Duke

Center for Critical Theory, September 24-27, 1987. A substantially

 47

edited version of this interview was published in Polygraph 2 and 3,

Spring 1989.

12. “The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern

Critic”

This interview between Harold Veeser and Gayatri Spivak was first

published in The New Historicism, ed. Harold Veeser (New York:

Routledge, 1989).

Outside in the Teaching Machine, was published in 1993, and

contains some of Spivak‟s highly engaging essays on literary works

such as Salman Rushdie‟s controversial “Satanic Verses”, and

twentieth-century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Karl Marx.

Spivak relentlessly “questions and deconstructs power structures

wherever they operate. In doing so, she provides a voice for those

who cannot speak, proving that the true work of resistance takes place

in the margins – outside in the teaching machine”. This book serves

as a valuable guide to responsible reading and teaching. Whether it is

literary texts, philosophy, or films, Spivak is indefatigable in her

questioning of contemporary pieties and in insisting that it is the study

of culture that can help us chart the production of versions of reality.

 48

While the trajectory of Spivak‟s early critical work was partly

concerned with the relationship between literary and cultural studies

and European colonialism, her later work on translation, transnational

literacy and subaltern rights signals a shift in emphasis. Spivak‟s

proposal in her lecture series in Death of a Discipline (2003),

originally presented in 2000 as part of the Wellek Library Lectures in

Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine – that

comparative literary studies should engage with the languages of the

global South, which she also names „subaltern languages‟ – defines a

radical political task for a discipline which is conventionally

concerned with reading literary texts written in different languages.

Spivak defends and promotes comparative literary studies as a

training of the imagination. What she perhaps means by the training of

the imagination in Death of a Discipline is consistent with her ethical

commitment to a singular pedagogical approach underpinning much

of her thought and practice: to learn to learn from the subaltern.

No doubt, Spivak‟s emphasis on pedagogy does not offer a rational

political blueprint to empower or emancipate the subaltern. Yet the

emphasis on pedagogy does provide a space for what she calls „one-

on-one epistemic change‟. As Spivak explains in an interview with

 49

Tani E. Barlow about her pedagogical work in rural schools in India

and Bangladesh, this change is “like training athletes one by one in

the hope that when others mobilize them, they will be mobilized more

successfully, critically. They will not just be led, or they will not

think that they are making choices, when the terms of the choice have

been taught them by those who mobilize” (Morton. Gayatri Spivak:

Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason p.161).

This analogy between „one-on-one epistemic change‟ and training

athletes certainly helps to elucidate the way in which Spivak‟s

teaching practice in Indian and Bangladeshi schools seeks to educate

her students to a point where they are able to identify and question the

dominant systems of political representation, which silence and

exclude them because of their class position.

Spivak calls the languages of the Southern Hemisphere subaltern

languages presumably because the official languages of national and

global political institutions tend to privilege elite national or European

languages, and in so doing effectively marginalize the languages of

the Southern Hemisphere and restrict the expansion of their literacy.

Spivak‟s proposal to learn the languages of the global South in order

to interrupt and overwrite the global hegemony of European

 50

languages may, as Judith Butler has suggested, offer a “radically

ethical framework for the approach to subaltern writing” (Spivak,

Death of a Discipline:Lectures in Critical Theory, jacket blurb).

The task of close reading in a non-European language that Spivak

proposes for scholars and students of comparative literature, as well as

global justice activists, is one that she also attempts to put into

practice in „Death of a Discipline. The first lecture in the series,

entitled “Crossing Borders”, for instance, offers a close reading of an

extract from a novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde,

Heremakhonon (1976): „an undisclosed West African subaltern

speaker‟ (Spivak, Death of a Discipline:Lectures in Critical Theory

,p.16) draws attention to the shifting linguistic and ethnic groups in

different West African societies, such as the Fulani and the Toucoleur.

In Spivak‟s reading of this passage, the proper names of these

languages „carry the sedimentation of the history of the movement of

peoples‟ in West Africa (Spivak, Death of a Discipline:Lectures in

Critical Theory). Furthermore, Spivak argues that the „movement of

peoples and languages‟ is historically sedimented „in the translation of

this passage from French to English’ (Spivak, Death of a

Discipline:Lectures in Critical Theory, 18). This historical

 51

sedimentation is significant for Spivak because it exemplifies what

she calls the restricted permeability of subaltern languages in an era of

globalization.

What Spivak means by „restricted permeability‟ is clarified in an

interview with Meyda Yegenoglu and Mahmut Mutman, which was

published in the journal New Formations (2002). Against the older

definition of subalternity, in which „the subaltern is precisely outside

the circuit of mobility‟, Spivak argues that the subaltern „is altogether

permeable from above‟. In other words, the subaltern has access to

the policies of Non-Governmental Organizations and global

commodity culture. Yet the influence of subaltern languages and

culture on policy making and political reform at the level of the state

or the Non-Governmental Organization is restricted. What is crucial

about the concept of „restricted permeability‟, however, is that it

conveys the subordinate status of subaltern languages, which are

spoken by socially marginalized linguistic communities. In contrast

to hegemonic European languages such as English, which have

become the international language of power, Spivak argues that

subaltern languages do not cross or permeate national and cultural

boundaries in the same way, and when they do, they are often ignored.
 52

To counter this problem, Spivak contends that the task of the

comparative literature specialist is to learn to read these languages as

they become historically sedimented in literary texts.

In “Righting Wrongs” (2003), an article that was originally presented

at the Oxford Amnesty lectures in 2001, she argues that “the rural

poor and [ … ] all species of the sub-proletariat” will remain an

“object of benevolence in human rights discourse‟ without the

recovering and training of the ethical imagination of such subaltern

groups” (Spivak, "Righting Wrongs", pp. 206-7). To counter this

problem, Spivak proposes a re-thinking of the subject of human rights

from the standpoint of the rural poor and the sub-proletariat in South

Asia. Such a re-thinking demands a new pedagogy that is capable of

suturing what Spivak calls the torn fabric of the subaltern episteme.

Although Spivak does not specify what it is that has done the tearing,

she implies that the divide was caused by centuries of class and caste

oppression, as well as the transition from colonial modernity to

globalization. What is crucial, however, is Spivak‟s attempt to suture

this tear through a pedagogy that strives to “learn well one of the

languages of the rural poor of the South” (Spivak, "Righting Wrongs"

p. 208). As Spivak explains: “for access to the subaltern episteme to

 53

devise a suturing pedagogy, you must take into account the

multiplicity of subaltern languages” (Spivak, "Righting Wrongs" p.

208). While this may be a sound ethical principle, Spivak does not

really elaborate on how exactly a basic knowledge of subaltern

languages would help to alter the class apartheid that perpetuates the

disenfranchisement of subaltern groups in rural India. Yet if this call

to „take into account the multiplicity of subaltern languages‟ is

situated in relation to Spivak‟s discussion of their „restricted

permeability‟, it becomes clear that promoting the transnational

literacy of a subaltern language may provide one strategy for

countering the silencing and exclusion of subaltern groups from

political representation at a local, national or global level.

Spivak‟s “A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the

Vanishing Present” (1999) was primarily a critique of postcolonial studies

and its relationship to the systematic inequalities of globalization in the

1990s. As a result of this focus, and because the book was published before

the terrorist attacks on America on 11 September 2001, the „vanishing

present‟ of which “A Critique of Postcolonial Reason” promises to offer a

„history‟ does not explicitly address the critical relationship between

postcolonial studies and the contemporary discourse of global political

 54

insecurity, also known as terrorism. Spivak has addressed the discourse of

terrorism in an essay titled “Terror: A Speech after 9-11” (2004), in which

she observes an „intense resurgence of nationalism‟ in the United States after

those attacks, epitomized by the Patriot Act (Spivak, "Terror: A Speech after

9-11" p. 84). For Spivak, the Patriot Act exemplifies how nationalism did

not disappear with the global financial restructuring of the economy that

followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990‟s. Rather, as Spivak

suggests, the contemporary world economic system was always driven by

the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. Like other

intellectual commentators on the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and

on the subsequent „war on terror‟ – including Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek,

Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton and Giorgio Agamben – Spivak addresses the

question of whether the terrorist attacks could be understood as a response to

globalization and US foreign policy, as well as the ambivalent legal status of

the terrorist suspects who were held in a state of indefinite detention in a

prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yet Spivak is crucially concerned to articulate an appropriate ethical

response to the attacks and to the war on terror. Spivak clarifies what she

means by an „ethical‟ response by distinguishing it from an „epistemological

construction of the other as an object of knowledge‟ (Spivak, "Terror: A

 55

Speech after 9-11" p. 83). While „epistemological constructions belong to

the domain of the law, which seeks to construct the other as an object of

knowledge […] in order to punish or acquit rationally‟, Spivak argues, the

“ethical interrupts the epistemological in order to listen to the other as if it

were a self, neither to punish nor to acquit” (Spivak, "Terror: A Speech after

9-11" p. 83). Spivak does not actually name the other as a terrorist at this

point in her essay; however, this is certainly implicit in what she goes on to

say about the ways in which the discourse of terrorism constitutes its object

of knowledge. Spivak observes how terrorism is a name for social

movements involving physical violence as well as the effect of terror

produced by the use of such physical violence (Spivak, "Terror: A Speech

after 9-11" p. 91). In the dominant discourse of terrorism, Spivak contends

that these meanings have been conflated so that the word is no more than an

antonym for war (Spivak, "Terror: A Speech after 9-11" p. 92). In this

slippage between terror and terrorism, Spivak implies that the other who is

constructed as an object of knowledge or a „terrorist‟ forecloses an

appropriate political and legal response to terrorism. Spivak emphasizes that

she is not condoning violence or terrorism: „I cannot and do not condone

violence, practiced by the state or otherwise‟ (Spivak, "Terror: A Speech

after 9-11" p. 93). Instead, she suggests that an ethical response to terrorism
 56

necessitates „an imaginative exercise in experiencing the impossible [and]

stepping into the space of the other‟ (Spivak, "Terror: A Speech after 9-11"

,p.94).

Spivak attempts to imagine the „space of the other‟ by way of an analogy

with Kant‟s theory of the sublime. In her view Kant‟s theory posits that the

human subject‟s cognitive faculties are unable to understand the magnitude

of the sublime object, and the subject is rendered „stupid‟ or „mindless‟ as a

result of this experience (Spivak, "Terror: A Speech after 9-11" p.94). In a

similar way, Spivak claims that „single coerced yet willed suicide “terror” is

„informed by the stupidity of belief taken to extreme‟ (Spivak, "Terror: A

Speech after 9-11" p. 94). The coercive training of suicide bombers to carry

out their deadly missions in the name of a religious belief may seem

analogous to the suspension of rational judgement associated with the

Kantian sublime. Yet, this analogy cannot account for the way in which that

religious belief provides a structure for training human beings to become

martyrs. After all, Kant‟s theory of the sublime was concerned with the

faculty of aesthetic judgement, not with suicide bombing.

Other Asias (2007), is an eloquent plea for a pedagogy of continental scope

that does not evade or erode the singular, „textured‟ life, thought and work of
 57

geographical regions and political minorities. According to Homi Bhabha,

the exemplary courage and extraordinary imagination that have

distinguished Spivak's work are now engaged in rich reflections on the

political art of humanistic education.”

In this major intervention into the 'Asian Century', Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak challenges the reader to re-think Asia, in its political and cultural

complexity, in the global South and in the metropole. The featured essays

include ,

1. “Righting Wrongs – 2002: Accessing Democracy among

the Aboriginals”.

2. “ Responsibility – 1992: Testing Theory in the Plains”.

3. “1994: Will Postcolonialism Travel?”.

4. “1996: Foucault and Najibullah”.

5. “Megacity – 1997: Testing Theory in Cities”.

6. “Moving Devi – 1997: The Non-Resident and the Expatriate”.

7. “Our Asias – 2001: How to Be a Continentalist”.

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8. “ Position without Identity –2004”: An Interview with

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by Yan Hairong.

This deeply passionate, ethical, and political book tells us that we must

pluralize Asia because it is only in a pluralized world that we can imagine a

more just one.

In the recent past, Spivak has experienced a radical reorientation in her

thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and

postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she

turns elsewhere to make her central argument, that aesthetic education is the

last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy.

An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation (2012) shows Spivak‟s

unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic or to

sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, thus making her task

formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites

Friedrich Schiller‟s concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson

with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her

teacher Paul de Man. Spivak‟s crucial question is, “ Are we ready to forfeit

the wealth of the world‟s languages in the name of global

communication?”… “Even a good globalization (the failed dream of

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socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues

must challenge,” Spivak writes. “The tower of Babel is our refuge.” (Spivak.

“An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation”). The essays on theory,

translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as

Assia Djebar, J. M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for

the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies,

imprisoned in the corporate university. “Perhaps,” she writes, “the literary

can still do something.” (Spivak. “An Aesthetic Education in the Era of

Globalisation”.)

In Nationalism and the Imagination (2009), Spivak expands upon her

previous postcolonial scholarship, employing a cultural lens to examine the

rhetorical underpinnings of the idea of the nation-state. In this intellectually

rigorous work, Spivak specifically analyzes the creation of Indian

sovereignty in 1947 and the tone of Indian nationalism, bound up with class

and religion, that arose in its wake. Spivak was five years old when

independence was declared, and she vividly writes: “These are my earliest

memories: Famine and blood on the streets.” (Spivak, Nationalism and the

Imagination) She recollects the songs and folklore that were prevalent at

the time in order to examine the role of the mother tongue and the

relationship between language and feelings of national identity.

 60

Originally given as an address at the University of Sofia in

Bulgaria, Nationalism and the Imagination provides powerful insight into

the historical narrative of India as well as compelling ideas that speak to

nationalist concerns around the world. Spivak explores the persistence of

nationalism in postcolonial cultural imaginaries and moves beyond critique

by offering the region as a name for a utopian unit of political collectivity

irreducible to genealogical fantasy. The regionality Spivak has in mind,

however, is not simply a material or institutional concretion; it is an

imaginative and ethical disposition dependent on the unlearning of the

nation‟s imagined uniqueness.

“When and how does the love of mother tongue, the love of my little corner

of ground become the nation thing?” Spivak asks (Spivak, Nationalism and

the Imagination p.13). The “nation thing” is not a product of a nationalist

public sphere, nor is its articulation to the structure of the state a historical

inevitability. It is instead a “rock-bottom comfort in one‟s language and

one‟s home,” which, she asserts, “is not a positive affect” (Spivak,

Nationalism and the Imagination,p.15). Nationalism works by “recoding . . .

this underived private as the antonym of the public sphere” (Spivak,

Nationalism and the Imagination p.18). The recoding of the private as the

antonym of the public does not deactivate this underived comfort; rather,
 61

nationalisms “are secured by the private conviction of special birth and hop

right from the underived private comfort” (Spivak, Nationalism and the

Imagination p.19). As she suggests, the disavowed supplementation of

public reason with private conviction of special birth conflicts with the

public sphere‟s foundational positing of a unified reason that is indifferent to

the “unique” origins of subjects (Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination

,p.19). The “hop” from the private to the public is thus not a transcendence

of the private but a disavowed process whereby the comfort derived from an

intimate relation to language and home is hypostatized as the public sphere‟s

basis. Spivak‟s text concerns itself with elaborating a literary pedagogy that

could interrupt this “hop.”

Spivak turns to literature because she believes that “the literary imagination

can impact on detranscendentalizing nationalism” (Spivak, Nationalism and

the Imagination, pp. 20-21). The turn to literature involves a risk, insofar as

literature has been complicit with the production of the nationalism that she

seeks to contest. However, it is not literature as such but a particular kind of

“readerly imagination” that holds the promise of “de-transcendentalizing

nationalism” (Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination, p.21). Spivak

explores the oral-formulaic literature of the women of an Indian subaltern

community to derive a model for this readerly imagination. Describing the

 62

oral-formulaic as working according to a principle of “equivalence,” she

suggests that “it is the inventiveness of equivalence that makes something

happen” (Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination p. 22). The formulaic

repetitions of this oral literature establish a framework in which divergent

places and histories can be “put in a space of apposition” (Spivak,

Nationalism and the Imagination, p.26). “Here, then,” she comments, “is a

thinking without nation…” (Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination p.26).

Spivak claims nationalism to be „reproductive heteronormativity‟. This

normative of nationalism, sustained by imagination, is reproduced time and

again in our public sphere. In fact, Spivak evinces that nationalism colludes

with the private sphere of our imagination to command the public sphere.

To resist this, Spivak opines that it is imperative to translate our subject-

position which can be achieved by reading diverse works in translation.

When we see our mother-tongue is being translated and we read texts which

are written in someone else‟s mother-tongue, we are resisting the importance

given to our „underived private‟. Comparative study of texts is instrumental

to get acquainted with and later, get acclimatized with language.

1.5 A review of some selected writings on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most influential figures in

contemporary critical theory. However, her theoretical work can sometimes

be difficult to understand. Stephen Morton‟s book titled Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak (2003) under the Routledge Critical Thinkers Series,

provides a stepping stone and guide to Spivak‟s early writings. This book

focuses on her key theoretical concepts, intellectual context and critical

reception, and provides an accessible introduction to Spivak. Stephen

Morton introduces Spivak‟s work through an analysis of such issues as :

methodology and Spivak‟s „difficult‟ style; deconstructive strategies; third

world women; the concept of the „subaltern‟ and the critique of western

feminism; re-reading Marx for the global capitalist era; Spivak‟s

contribution to colonial discourse studies and postcolonial theory. Having

examined the ways in which Spivak has transformed contemporary cultural

theory, and in particular feminist and postcolonial thought, Morton

concludes with a guide to reading Spivak‟s work and that of her critics.

Another book that introduces and discusses the works of Spivak is Sangeeta

Ray‟s Gayatri Chakravorty: In Other Words. This book explores the key

concepts and themes that emerge from them, such as ethics, literature,

feminism, pedagogy, postcoloniality, violence, and war. It also assesses

Spivak‟s often contentious relationship with feminist and postcolonial

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studies, and considers the significance of her work for other fields such as

ethnography, history, cultural studies and philosophy.

The experience of colonialization and the challenge of the post-colonial

world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse

and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-

colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies,

Africa, and Canada, and challenges the existing canon and dominant ideas

of literature and culture. Bill Ashcroft, Alan Lawson, and Helen Tiffin‟s

1989 book The Empire Writes Back, is one of the first introductory guides

to postcolonial literary criticism in English. The book opens up debates

about the interrelationships of these literatures, investigates the powerful

forces acting on language in the post-colonial texts, and shows how these

texts constitute a radical critique of the assumptions under-lying Eurocentric

notions of literature and language. It is the first major theoretical account of

a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of

post-colonial culture. It contains a short discussion of Spivak‟s contribution

to postcolonial and feminist reading practices and is also a useful

introduction to postcolonial criticism and theory.

In the introduction to her collection of essays, Ethics after Idealism:Theory

– Culture – Ethnicity - Reading, (1998), Rey Chow describes a particularly

 65

angry and telling response she encountered to her argument in this book that

contemporary multiculturalism risks fascism in its positive imagining of

ethnic others: “Only she could write something like this, „some readers

charged, meaning, I suppose, that only a „woman of color‟ and therefore a

double minority, could possibly mount a criticism of multiculturalism as

such without getting into trouble, without being labelled „racist‟.” It is a

charge that Chow, rather than shying away from, understands as the ethical

impetus for her own book. That is, she sets out to conduct an investigation

into the conditions that give this response its relevance. If, as Chow

suggests, idealism has been the primary mode through which cultural studies

has attempted to establish a form of resistance theory, it is also this idealism

by which “the „other‟ can say or do anything in the current climate without

being considered wrong.” Rey Chow‟s response to this critique, however, is

not the reactionary call for recognition of a liberal, abstract version of

equality that dispenses with the “special interests” of race, gender, sexuality,

and so forth. Rather, Chow explores the possibility of an interpretive

politics that speak to non-Western cultural forms in order to draw out their

“unconscious, irrational and violent nuances.” This analytic is perhaps most

thoroughly addressed in the chapter from which the book takes its title,

chapter three, “Ethics after Idealism.” Here she offers careful, close
 66

readings of the writings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Slavoj Zizek in

order to understand how “two of our most energetic post-Marxist thinkers”

have inquired and theorized the asymmetries through which social

conditions and exploitation are reproduced. While Spivak and Zizek arrive

at two different explanatory models, Chow contends that both offer a

conceptualization of the social that allows for an ethics without positing an

idealized other that serves as its center. Rey Chow compares Spivak‟s

deconstructive rereading of Marx to Slavoj Zizek‟s re-thinking of ideology

criticism through Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Postcolonial Theory:A Critical Introduction (1998) by Leela Gandhi, maps

out the field of postcolonial studies in terms of its wider philosophical and

intellectual context, drawing important connections between postcolonial

theory and poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism and feminism.

Gandhi assesses the contribution of major theorists such as Edward Said,

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and also points to

postcolonialism‟s relationship to earlier thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and

Mahatma Gandhi. The book contains a chapter on feminism that places

Spivak‟s work in relation to Third World feminist criticism. Leela Gandhi

analyses postcolonialism‟s troubled relationship with postcolonal feminism.

While both discourses draw on postructuralist theory and aim at inverting

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the “prevailing hierarchies of gender/culture/race,” postcolonial feminists

such as Spivak and Sara Suleri contend that too much “focus on racial

politics...elides the double colonization of women under imperial

conditions”- in this case, “the forgotten casualty of both imperial ideology

and native and foreign patriarchies”. They have repeatedly cautioned critics

not to let the racial issues override gender issues because, as they argue,

subalterns are always gendered.

As a theorist, a feminist and a cultural critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

has a rigorously expanded our understanding of some of the key issues of

contemporary thought. The Spivak Reader (1996) edited by Donna Landry

and Gerald Maclean, both introduces many of her most important writings,

while also making it possible for students of Spivak‟s work to view her

project as a whole. In selecting from among the range of possible options

presented by Spivak‟s list of publications, talks, and interviews, the editors

have attempted to assemble an exemplary series of places to start reading

Spivak. There is an attempt to trace what Spivak calls the “itinerary” of her

thinking over the last fifteen years. The power of this specific metaphor

arises from its illustration of how Spivak‟s thinking proceeds: it is not fixed

and finite in the form of thought as a “product”, but active – thinking – a

journey that involves moving back and forth over both familiar and less
 68

familiar intellectual terrains while constantly interrogating its own premises.

Here the strong connection between Spivak‟s research and writing and her

teaching can be observed, since most of her published writings have arisen

from attempting to work through the critical problems that crop up in

pedagogical situations. In a certain way, Spivak‟s reception has been a

curiously silent or oblique one. Perhaps her achievements seemed too

formidable or complicated to be commented upon according to the usual

forms. Indeed, while citations to her work can be found thickly scattered

across various fields of scholarly publication, the true range and importance

of her intellectual influence cannot be measured in the number f scholarly

articles, chapters, or books dedicated to “explaining” Spivak. For that one

would somehow have to assess not only the conversations and ideas that her

lectures and writings continue to stimulate directly, but also the

immeasurable differences that her work has made to the thinking of

feminists, cultural critics, and political activists across the globe. The essays

collected in The Spivak Reader range across Spivak‟s contributions to

many different aspects of intellectual and political life subsequent to her

introduction of Derrida to English-speaking audiences. The editors, rather

than adopting a chronological sequence for the essays have used a thematic

and developmental arrangement. The nine essays are bracketed by two

 69

interviews, “Bonding in difference,” with Alfred Arteaga, and “Subaltern

Talk.” The first five essays in The Spivak Reader represent key moments in

Spivak‟s deconstructive critique, especially the ways it has both challenged

and transformed the development of feminism, Marxist analysis, and cultural

theory. The next four essays sharpen, extend, and broaden that project by

examining the politics of translation and multiculturalism in a variety of

textual, historical, and political arenas. This order indicates how the

itinerary of Spivak‟s critical thinking is not a settled achievement by a

continuing process, a constant challenge to reread Freud, Marx, Derrida, and

Foucault, bringing their provisional certainties to crisis as we attempt to

negotiate with the daily events that constitute our political lives in both the

local and the global sense. Spivak pays considerable attention to the

management of the subaltern in the southern hemisphere, the developing

world of the New World Order, so that by a “setting to work” of theory in

these locations she can gauge the limits of the theory that influences her.

Beginning Postcolonialism (2000) by John McLeod provides a clear

overview of postcolonial literature and theory, and includes some discussion

of Spivak‟s thought. It also gives a range of examples showing how

postcolonial theory can be applied in the practice of reading literary texts.

Similarly, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, by Gilbert-

 70

Moore, provides a rigorous historical study of postcolonial theory and

criticism from Chinua Achebe to Homi Bhabha. The book includes a

detailed chapter on Spivak‟s work that focuses on her work on the subaltern

and criticism of western feminism.

The essay “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”, by Benita

Parry criticises Spivak for silencing the voice of subaltern resistance in her

use of western critical theory, while Shetty and Bellamy‟s 2000 essay

“Postcolonialism‟s Archive Fever” in Diacritics 30 (1) pp.25-48, provides a

detailed reading of “Can the Subaltern Speak” , focusing specifically on the

colonial archives discussed in Spivak‟s essay. Asha Varadharajan‟s Exotic

Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (1995) contains a

chapter on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak which tries to redeem Spivak‟s

thinking from, what Varadharajan suggests, is the abyss of deconstruction

via the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno. Robert Young‟s White

Mythologies: Writing History and The West (1990), also contains an

insightful chapter on Spivak‟s early thought. Young‟s 2001 book

Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction which is a detailed historical

study of anti and postcolonial thought, contains a short, but insightful

discussion of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, which situates their work in
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relation to the history of anti-colonial thought, Third World national

liberation movements, and the postcolonial revision of Marxism.

Stephen Morton‟s book Gayatri Spivak (2007) presents her seminal

contribution to contemporary thought that defies disciplinary boundaries.

According to Morton, “from her early translations of Derrida to her

subsequent engagement with Marxism, feminism and postcolonial studies

and her recent work on human rights, the war on terror and globalization,

she has proved to be one of the most vital of present-day thinkers”. In this

book Stephen Morton offers an advanced introduction to and a critique of

Spivak‟s work. He examines her engagements with philosophers and other

thinkers from Kant to Paul de Man, feminists from Cixous to Helie-Lucas

and literary texts by Charlotte Bronte, J.M.Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi and

Jean Rhys. Spivak‟s thought is also situated in relation to subaltern studies.

Throughout the book, Morton interrogates the materialist basis of Spivak‟s

thought and demonstrates the ethical and political commitment which lies at

the heart of her work. Donna Landry, in speaking of this book says, “

Gayatri Spivak‟s refusal to settle for the quick fix, the empty piety, the mere

abstract calculus, or the language of expediency has never appeared more

salutary than it does today. As violence counters violence in the name of

moral righteousness, this lucid book, like Spivak‟s own critique of

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postcolonial studies, is a timely reminder of the complicity between

imagined liberal benevolence and the ruthless pursuit of global hegemony at

any cost. If one slogan emerges from Stephen Morton‟s analysis it is the

ever more pressing need to “learn to learn from the subaltern”.

Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2006) is a collection of

three conversations between Spivak and Swapan Chakravorty, Suzana

Milevska, Tani E. Barlow. These interviews reflect the international

character of her intellectual engagement as, in her criss-crossings of the

globe, she engages with activists, scholars and writers located in different

cultural contexts, from America to India to Macedonia and China.

“Strategies of Vigilance” is an interview of Spivak which is one of the

eleven essays by Angela McRobbie in her book Postmodernism and Popular

Culture. These essays deal with the issues which have dominated cultural

studies in recent years. A key theme is the notion of postmodernity as a

space for social change and political potential. McRobbie explores everyday

life as a site of immense social and psychic complexity to which she argues

that cultural studies scholars must return through ethnic and empirical work;

the sound of living voices and spoken language. She also argues for

feminists working in the field to continue to question the place and meaning

of feminist theory in a postmodern society.

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Although deconstruction has become a popular catchword, as an intellectual

movement it has never entirely caught on within the university. For some in

the academy, deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are

responsible for the demise of accountability in the study of literature.

Countering these facile dismissals of Derrida and deconstruction, Herman

Rapoport in his book The Theory Mess , explores the incoherence that has

plagued critical theory since the 1960s and the resulting legitimacy crisis in

the humanities. The book contains a chapter titled, “Deconstructing

Otherwise: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak”. Against the backdrop of a rich,

informed discussion of Derrida‟s writings – and how they have been

misconstrued by critics and admirers alike – The Theory Mess investigates

the vicissitudes of Anglo-American criticism and proposes some

possibilities for reform.

“In our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the

understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding

body of knowledge in its own right”, writes David Lodge in the book

Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. The new edition of David Lodge

and Nigel Wood‟s Modern Criticism and Theory, which is fully revised and

expanded to take account of the developments in theoretical contemporary

literary criticism and introduces the reader to the guiding concepts of present
 74

literary and cultural debate by presenting substantial extracts from the most

seminal thinkers, as well as important and representative work from the

major schools in contemporary criticism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak‟s

Feminism and Critical Theory is one of the essays in this book.

Laura Chrisman‟s Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader,

was published in 1993. Chrisman provides important new paradigms for

understanding imperial literature, Englishness, and black transnationalism.

Her concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad‟s Heart of

Darkness, to fatherhood in Du Bois‟ The Souls of Black Folk; from the

marketing of south African literature to cosmopolitanism in Chinua Achebe;

from utopian discourse in Benita Parry to Fredric Jameson‟s theorisation of

empire. Chrisman also critically engages with the postcolonial intellectuals

Paul Gilroy, David Lloyd, Anne McClintock, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak

and Robert Young, uncovering conservatism within unexpected quarters.

This book joins a growing chorus of materialist voices within postcolonial

studies, and addresses an urgent need for greater attention to the political,

historical and socio-economic elements of cultural production.

________________________________________________________________
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Chapter II

Spivak and Feminism

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's interventions in feminist theory have

radically transformed the way in which feminism is viewed today. In her

writings, she has challenged the western feminists who claim to represent

all women. She counters the assumption that all women are the same, and

draws our attention to the fact that each culture and the women in that

particular culture or country are different and unique. Spivak strongly

emphasizes the need for feminist theory to seriously consider the material

lives and histories of Third World women.

Spivak began her writings on feminism in the 1980's at a time when

the English speaking world was just being introduced to French feminist

theory. Her essays , "French Feminism in an International Frame" (1981),

and "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985), came on

the scene almost at the same time as the writings of Julia Kristeva, Luce

Irigaray and Helene Cixous. Spivak, in her writings on feminism, deals

with contemporary French feminist theory, Marxist feminism, and feminist

critiques of political economy. However, the most important and

controversial of her ideas are her objections to French feminism in its

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universal claims to speak for all women. Spivak has collaborated with

postcolonial feminist thinkers like Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Rajeshwari

Sunder Rajan, Nawal El Saadawi and Kumari Jayawardena in challenging

the assumption that all women are the same. She also exhorting the

European feminists to respect the individuality of women of different

cultures and guard against subsuming the identity of the Third World woman

into that of the First World woman.

The pioneering work done by the early feminist movement through

the social and political struggles led by women in Europe and North

America had succeeded in securing several democratic rights and freedoms

for women. These movements were guided by the principles of liberal

humanism which was based on the idea that all human beings are the same

and share the same values. From this, it is presumed that all human beings

should have the same basic rights. It was on the basis of this presumption

that women fought for and gained rights and freedoms such as women's

franchise, equal pay and reproductive rights.

As per universal humanist thought, the primary difference between

men and women is biological, while the cultural and social difference comes

at a later stage. Simone de Beauvoir however, challenges this notion with

her famous statement: "One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman".
 77

Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) speaks of how it is possible to

understand 'sex' as a biological category through the dominant discourses of

medicine, family, educational institutions and, the Church. She concludes

that it is the power of language which is in the hands of these dominant

social institutions that construct and determine human identity, and the

woman's identity as well. Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray

and Julia Kristeva broadly agree that feminine identity is a social rather than

a biological construct. However, because this identity is 'constructed' by the

dominant and powerful patriarchal institutions such as the Law, Media,

Family, State, Education, it cannot be resisted or rejected at will.

Spivak's gives her own definition of a woman in her essay "Feminism

and Critical Theory" (1987). She writes:

"My own definition of a woman is very simple: it rests on the work

'man' as used in texts that provide the foundation for the corner of the

literary criticism establishment that I inhabit. You might say that this is a

reactionary position. Should I not carve out an independent definition

for myself as a woman?" . (Spivak, 1987, p.77)

This definition, which is a reactionary one, is similar to Luce Irigaray's

argument in "This Sex which is Not One":

 78

"For the elaboration of a theory of woman, men I think suffice"

(Irigaray 1985, 123).

Yet, both Irigaray and Spivak are of the opinion that any independent

definition of a woman cannot stand in a culture and society that is governed

by binary oppositions that promote and perpetuate the subordination of

women.

Keeping aside this binary system and the concern with the difference

between men and women, Spivak shifts the focus from the negative or

marginal representation of "women" by a male-dominated society, to focus

on categories of women that have been ignored and marginalised despite

western feminism's advances in securing rights and privileges for women.

These categories include the subaltern women, colonised women, and the

working class women. Spivak's focus is on the cultural differences between

Third World women and First women, an aspect that she feels has been

ignored by the First World/French feminists.

One of the issues dealt with in Spivak's essay "French Feminism in an

International Frame" is the tendency of some French feminists to narrate and

describe the experiences of Third World women from their own (First

World) point of view, and more importantly, from their own experience of
 79

being 'female' in a First World country. This approach, according to Spivak

is likely to either ignore important differences of race, culture, language,

social class; or, runs the risk of creating/reinforcing stereotypes of 'Third

World' women. Spivak elaborates on this in her essay with the help of

Mahasweta Devi's short story "Breast Giver" which she uses to counter the

assumption that is prevalent in Western feminism that childbirth is unwaged

domestic labour. In the story, Jashoda is the wife of Kangali who works for

the rich, upper-caste Haldar family. A crisis strikes when Kangali is crippled

for life as a consequence of being accidentally hit by a car being driven

rashly by one of the Haldar sons. Since he is no longer fit to work, the

family has no income. It is at this point that Jashoda, who is at that time a

nursing mother, is hired as a wet nurse for the Haldar family children. As

compensation for this work, she and her family, including her husband

Kangali, are well looked after. In order to meet the requirements of her job

as a wet nurse she has to go through repeated pregnancies so that there is a

regular supply of breast milk for the Haldar family. The continuous cycle of

abuse to her maternal body through impregnation, gestation, delivery, and

lactation, takes a serious toll on her health. Jashoda develops breast cancer

that remains untreated and she finally dies a terrible, painful and lonely

death.
 80

Spivak's materialist approach in reading Mahasweta Devi's "Breast

Giver" demonstrates that Jashoda's reproductive body and breast milk has

exchange value which Jashoda uses to earn an income to support her

husband and children. The abuse and exploitation of her body, which

happens as part of her job as a wet nurse, finally leads to her death. Thus,

the experiences of Jashoda as a professional mother, challenges the universal

claims of Western Marxist feminism to speak for all women. To quote

Spivak:

"The fictional character Jashoda calls into question that aspect of

Western Marxist feminism which, from the point of view of work, trivializes

the theory of value and, from the point of view of mothering as work,

ignores the mother as subject" (Spivak, 1987, 258).

This female character Jashoda from a short story written by a Third

World fiction writer Mahasweta Devi may seem distant and far removed

from the First World academic circles and textual reading in Western

universities; a kind of "privileged distance". Spivak however feels that this

privileged distance cannot and should not be a reason for First World

feminists to forget about, or ignore the marginalized, oppressed, subaltern

women. For Spivak, any act of reading, more so if it is in a Western

University classroom, can have very far-reaching social and political

 81

consequences. In her essay "Practical Politics of an Open End" , Spivak

argues that:

"The manipulation of Third World Labour sustains the continued

resources of the U.S. academy" (Spivak. 1990, 97) .

Spivak is deeply concerned about the fact that the feminist anthology ignores

the important issue of gendering in neo-colonial societies. She shifts the

focus on women who work from their homes, women workers in export

based foreign investment factories, women who have been subcontracted by

large multinational firms, etc.

Unlike the western feminists, not only does Spivak refuse to ignore

the political oppression of Third World disempowered groups, she also

questions and challenges what she calls the "sanctioned ignorance" of

western academic programs. According to Spivak, anyone who is able to

read her works, or the writings of Western feminist theory, will definitely be

a part of the "privileged" lot. Being in this privileged category renders one

incapable of understanding the lives of those who do not belong to this

category (the Other). This inability/incapacity, Spivak considers as a "loss".

From this notion stems one of Spivak's popular statements and projects; that

of "Unlearning one's privilege as one's loss" (Spivak, The Post colonial

 82

Critic,1990, p.9). This unlearning can help in recognizing how the lives and

experiences of disempowered groups have been ignored by the dominant

representations of the world in the areas of literature, history or media.

In "French Feminism in an International Frame", Spivak takes up

another example of how some Western feminists make the universal claim

of speaking for all women, wherein women of diverse cultures, race, social

background, etc, are all placed under the common umbrella of the "universal

woman". The particular example that Spivak dwells upon in this essay is

Julia Kristeva's representation of the lives and histories of Chinese women.

Spivak arrives at this point of her critique of the limitations of Western

feminism, by first examining her own position and choices that motivated

her decision to commit to feminism.

"The 'choice' of English Honours by an upper-class young woman in

the Calcutta of the fifties was itself highly overdetermined. Becoming a

professor of English in the US fitted in with the 'brain drain'. In due course,

a commitment to feminism was the best of a collection of accessible

scenarios" (Spivak 1987).

Spivak was a "First Class First" English honours student of Calcutta

University who studied a conservative English Literature course. Therefore,

 83

her choice of committing to the feminist cause was in a way, a challenge to

the conservatism of English literary studies. Her critique of Western

feminism is also the result of her own introspection and critical examination

of the conclusions she had drawn about some washerwomen whom she

overheard conversing about ownership of the land during a visit to her rural

ancestral home in Bengal. This was immediately after India's independence

from British rule . The conversation between these women revealed that

they were not even aware of the fact that the ownership of the land had

passed from the East India Company to the British Raj, and from there to the

independent Republic of India. At that time she considered with impatience

their ignorance and poor knowledge of the historical facts about India. It

was only later, through a more mature approach and a careful process of

unlearning that she realized that her "precocious" judgment of these women

was due largely to the 'privileged distance' between her and these women.

She was unable to understand that for these poor women, all these

cataclysmic changes had absolutely no significance or meaning since it did

not affect their everyday material lives. Their lives remained unchanged

from the time of the rule of the East India Company, the British Raj, and

then the Indian government. This personal anecdote that was a revelation to

Spivak about how these poor women's lives had not changed, and were not
 84

emancipated despite decolonization. This is what prompts her to critique

western feminism which like her own response to the washerwomen, tends

to ignore the non-western women from third world countries.

In "French Feminism in an International Frame" Spivak challenges western

feminists who make the universal claim of speaking for all women, where

women of diverse cultures, race, social background, etc., are all placed under

the common umbrella of the "universal woman". Spivak , in her essay

exposes the narcissistic tendency in French feminist Julia Kristeva that is

revealed in her book About Chinese Women (1977). In it, Kristeva

represents the lives and histories of Chinese women by fitting them into the

framework of a western female subject. The book describes her first

encounter in the village square, with a group of Chinese women peasants

whom she terms „an enormous crowd‟.

“an enormous crowd is sitting in the sun: they wait for us wordlessly,

perfectly still. Calm eyes, not even curious, but slightly amused or anxious:

in any case, piercing, and certain of belonging to a community which we

will never have anything to do” (Kristeva 1977, p.11).

Although it initially seems that Kristeva wishes to engage with these

Chinese women in order to learn from their historical and cultural

 85

experiences, what she is really concerned about, according to Spivak, is her

own identity as a Western woman being questioned by the silent gaze of

Chinese women. Spivak terms this as the tendency of some western

poststructuralist intellectuals to challenge the authority of western

knowledge and subjectivity by invoking other non-western cultures.

Kristeva‟s narration of her encounter with the Chinese women and Chinese

culture exemplifies this. Although Kristeva wishes to distance herself from

discourses that label non-western cultures as primitive and backward, she

ends up distancing herself too from the women since they are not really the

subjects of her inquiry. She is self-conscious about her typical middle-class

French education and her background that she feels creates a distance and

an unbreachable gap between herself and the Chinese women who view her

as an outsider and a foreigner. Kristeva then shifts her focus to the ancient

matriarchal origins of China in order to contrast it with the patriarchal

monotheism of western thought. She argues that “monotheistic unity in the

West is sustained by a radical separation of the sexes”, and the Judaeo-

Christian West is supported by the Fall of Adam and Even in the Book of

Genesis. Once again, Spivak points out that Kristeva‟s aim in focusing on

the matriarchal origins of China is firstly to use it to provide a feminist

utopia that is a contrast and an alternative to the patriarchal monotheism of

 86

the West; and secondly, to use the ancient Chinese matriarch to challenge

the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in which

describe women‟s bodies as repressed. Spivak therefore concludes that

Kristeva is not really interested in the real, material, present-day lives of the

Chinese women.

Spivak is also critical of Kristeva‟s utopian prediction for the sexual

freedom of Chinese women. This she feels can do further harm than good

for women in the Third World for who changes against sexism in the First

World countries mean absolutely nothing. The liberties that First World

feminists fight for may be considered as luxuries and may run the risk of

being identified with “free sex”.

Spivak attributes these flaws or deficiencies in Kristeva‟s thought to

the fact that she ignores the important aspect of class and cultural differences

between women. To remedy this, Spivak proposes a more sophisticated map

that embraces diverse cultures, societies, races, ideologies, etc., while at the

same time retaining their distinct differences and identities. She calls for

what she terms as “an alternative geography of female sexuality”.

In her writings on the issue of female sexuality, Spivak is critical of

the valorization of non-reproductive sexual pleasure. She feels that this

 87

may have significance as an effective political goal in the Western First

World countries but may not be as significant for Third World women. She

also counters the presumption that clitoridectomy (repression of female

sexuality) is a ritual imposed on Third World women, by suggesting that

symbolic clitoridectomy has always been practiced in all societies under the

name of “motherhood”. Therefore, clitoridectomy, or repression of female

sexual pleasure has been a problem for women in all societies. In her

reading of Devi‟s short story “Breast Giver”, Spivak gives us a clear account

of the geography of female sexuality. Jashoda as the wet nurse and a baby

and milk producing „machine‟ is afflicted by breast cancer and the ugly,

putrefying sores, rather than orgasm, become the excess of the woman‟s

body. This picture is in total contrast to the French feminist theorists who

valorize women‟s non-reproductive sexual pleasure as a universal strategy

for women‟s political resistance.

Spivak‟s essay “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”

(1985) also focuses on this issue of the geography of female sexuality.

Spivak‟s reading of Charlotte Bronte‟s Jane Eyre foregrounds the imperialist

sub-text in the narrative. In this essay, Spivak challenges the feminist

readings of the Anglo-American critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,

as well as Nancy Armstrong, who celebrate the female individualism and

 88

heroism of Jane, but conspicuously exclude the other female character

Bertha Mason‟s colonial genealogy. Spivak‟s re-reading of these three texts

under the influence of the thought of Foucault and Said is an example of

colonial discourse where there is no boundary between fictional discourse

and the discourse of institutional or political power.

Spivak‟s argument in this essay is that while Anglo – American

feminist literary criticism represents Jane Eyre as a liberated woman, the

other woman (Bertha Mason) is not even considered human, and ignored.

She is the strange, foreign, unknowable “Other”, very similar to the Chinese

peasant women in Kristeva‟s About Chinese Women. Both Bertha Mason

and Chinese peasant women are presented as denuded of any culture or

history of their own. They are mere foils to establish the stability of the

Western subject, Jane. Strangely, the individual rights and freedoms that

Jane, the white-western-woman is given in the novel, are in the very same

novel denied to Bertha Mason – the white Jamaican creole woman. Jane‟s

struggle and quest for individual autonomy that is restricted to the domestic

sphere of Victorian Britain is commended by the critics, but Bertha‟s

attempts to secure her rights are ignored. Jean Rhys‟ postcolonial novel

“Wide Sargasso Sea” make manifest the character of Bertha Mason who is,

in this novel, a fully fleshed out character with a distinct culture and history;
 89

the „good wife‟ of Rochester, who is locked up in the attic. Bertha is not

innately monstrous as is made out to be by Bronte‟s novel, but behaves in a

monstrous way after her basic rights are taken away. She attacks Richard

Mason her brother in anger, when he reminds her about the legal contract of

marriage because of which she is now the private “property” of Rochester.

Spivak does not undermine or negate the work done by the Western

feminists. However, she is critical of the fact that they tell only one side of

the story, for example, Jane‟s story in Jane Eyre. Spivak‟s reading of Jane

Eyre focuses, not on the patriarchal system, or the unequal relationship

between Men and Women, but rather on the character who has been ignored

and marginalized, i.e. Bertha Mason, and the inequalities between the two

women characters arising largely because they belong to two different

cultures.

Another important issue that comes up in the essay “Three Women‟s

Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”, is that of justifying British

Imperialism as a social mission. With reference to the novel Jane Eyre,

Spivak argues that the manner in which Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre are

presented, persuades the reader to believe that the white European female

individual is socially and culturally superior to the non-western woman.

Jane is a paragon of feminine virtue, while Bertha is a man, bestial,

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monstrous Other who‟s soul needs to be saved and who needs to be made

into a proper human being. The propagation of this stereotype of the

western woman as culturally and socially superior in contrast to the

stereotypical non-western woman who is wild and filled with sexualized

passion, not only gave the impetus, but also justified the colonizing and

subjugation of non-western peoples through the project of Imperialism.

Through these arguments in her essays “French Feminism in an

International Frame” and, “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism”, Spivak concludes that by ignoring the separate and distinct

cultures and lives of non-western women, western feminism has claimed to

speak for all women which in turn has resulted in very limited benefits of

“feminism” as such to the third world women. Also, by creating stereotypes

of non-western women who are either passive, wild, and denuded of history

and culture, the history of Western feminism becomes complicit in the

project of imperialist expansion. For Feminism to become more meaningful

and significant, and overcome these limitations, Spivak suggests that, “The

academic feminist must learn to learn from them rather than simply

correcting the historical experiences of disempowered women with our

superior theory and enlightened compassion” (Spivak 1987).

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Chapter III

Spivak and Marxism

Spivak‟s publications on the writings of Marx have had a great deal of

influence in academic circles, and are yet another instance of her sustained

critical engagement with important thinkers of the intellectual tradition.

Political speech-making and left-wing organizational work have been part of

her intellectual formation from her student days in Calcutta, and her

continued interest in Marx is visible in the many essays that she has

published on the subject. Despite the disintegration and collapse of the

Soviet bloc which caused many in the Capitalist West to triumphantly

proclaim the death of Socialism, Spivak continues to vouch for the relevance

of Marx‟s thinking to contemporary politics and economics because, “What

Marxism really has to offer is global systems and, especially in the Third

World, „Crisis Theory‟ ” (Spivak, The Post Colonial Critic). Donna Landry

and Gerald Maclean, in their introductory note published in The Spivak

Reader while attempting to explain Spivak‟s continued interest in Marx

state that, “Marx gives us a way of conceptualizing capitalist logic on a

global scale; and while the continued development of capitalism depends

upon this, it is something that has become increasingly difficult for people to
 92

comprehend in their everyday existence. The interconnectedness between

events happening on Wall Street, in European or U.S. universities and

shopping malls, and in the factories and villages of the Third World has

become difficult to grasp. This knowledge gap allows various forms of

complicity between Western prosperity, including education systems, and

the spectacular dynamics of exploitation to continue. This complicity

through nonknowledge of the international division of labour is something

Spivak frequently takes pains to point out, particularly emphasizing the

importance of women‟s labour to these international calculations.” (The

Spivak Reader).

Spivak‟s readings of Marx‟s texts draw attention to their textuality, to

their refusals of economic reductionism as scientific law, their

indeterminacies, and the leverage offered by Marx‟s materialist predication

of the subject as labor power, for posing the question of value in literary and

cultural studies, in a way not entirely ignorant of the international division of

labour. For Spivak, the writings of Marx are even more relevant today

when, as a result of the International Division of Labour, one witnesses the

pathetic conditions of women workers and child labourers in Third World

countries.
 93

Spivak, along with other postcolonial thinkers like Edward Said, are

critical of the fact that though Marx wrote in the 19 th century, and was aware

of European colonialism in Asia and Africa, he does not include this aspect

in his writings but focuses only on the white male worker. Despite this

drawback, Marx is still relevant to postcolonial theorists who find his

writings useful to define and negotiate various forms of domination and

resistance in the Third World. As Robert Young in his book

Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction contends: “Anti- and

postcolonial thought has always been engaged in a process of reformulating,

translating and transforming Marxism for its own purposes, and this has

operated as a critical dynamic tradition within Marxism itself. If

postcolonial theory is the cultural product of decolonization, it is also the

historical product of Marxism in the anti-colonial arena. For many of the

first generation of postcolonial theorists, Marxist theory was so much their

starting point, so fundamental to what they were doing, so dominant in

contemporary intellectual culture, that it was assumed as a base line prior to

all further work.” ( Young, 2001, 168)

Spivak‟s reading of Marx through the deconstructive approach which

developed into an ongoing dialogue between the philosophical discourses of

Marxism and deconstruction, can be read in the following essays: “Scattered

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Speculations on the Question of Value”, “Speculations on Reading Marx:

After Reading Derrida”, “Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida”,

“Supplementing Marxism” and, “Ghostwriting”. The deconstructive

method of reading Marx imposes a rigour that she likens to “a literary

reading of a philosophical text”.

More than his earlier writings, which Spivak finds too narrow and

inflexible to account for the diverse social movement of the twentieth

century, she is interested in Marx‟s later writings which she relates to the

contemporary exploitation of women‟s reproductive bodies in the Third

World. As she states in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:

Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, “Marx‟s prescience is fulfilled

in postfordism and the explosion of global homeworking. The subaltern

woman is now to a large extent the support of production”. (Spivak, A

Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing

Present”, 1999, 67). However, this should not be misread as Spivak‟s

support for the exploitation of women‟s labour in the Third World, but

should be seen as an attempt to correct the Euro-centric and male-centric

focus of Marx‟s thought.

The conditions of economic exploitation in the 19th century that Marx

writes about were very different as compared to the conditions that exist
 95

today. For example, the 19th century workers were all males, all whites, and

all working in one place. Hence, their protests against low wages or bad

working conditions could be organised easily. In contrast, in the present

circumstances, with the international division of labour, the multinationals

have sub-contracted their manufacturing units to third world countries where

the major work force comprises of third world women, scattered over

different countries, small units, and home workers too. In such

circumstances, organising any kind of protest seems difficult, if not

impossible. Spivak gives us an example of a failed protest attempt by

women workers in her essay “Feminism and Critical Theory” (1982). “A

group of women workers in a factory based in Seoul, South Korea, but

owned by Control Data, a U.S. based multi-national, went on strike for a

wage increase in 1982. The union leaders were subsequently dismissed and

imprisoned; in retaliation, the women workers took hostage two visiting U.S.

vice-presidents, demanding reinstatement of the union leaders. The dispute

was ended when the Korean male workers at the factory beat up the female

workers” (Spivak, Feminism and Critical Theory, 1982). This instance

reveals how in the global capitalist economy, women workers are doubly

exploited – by the powerful Corporations, and also by the patriarchal

structures which govern them. Spivak‟s comment in “Scattered Speculations

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on the Question of Value”, further underline the vulnerability of women-

workers in third world countries: “It is a well-known fact that the worst

victims of the recent exacerbation of the international division of labour are

women. They are the true surplus army of labour in the current conjuncture.

In their case, patriarchal social relations contribute to their production as the

new focus of super-exploitation.” (Spivak, “ Scattered Speculations on the

Question of Value”, 1987, 167).

Spivak uses Mahasweta Devi‟s Short Story, “Doulouti the Bountiful”

to highlight the plight of the subaltern woman. In the story, Doulouti is

forcibly made into a bonded labourer and later pushed into prostitution.

Though the nationalist movement made several democratic promises for the

emancipation of Indians, after independence, the subaltern women did not

get any benefit. Some, like Douloti, were not even aware of the meaning of

independence, and from whom they were being granted independence. Their

lives remain unchanged. Spivak‟s reading of this story focuses on the proper

name “Douloti”, which in Bengali means “traffic in wealth”. The last

sentence of the story in Bengali is “Bharat jhora hoye Dolouti” which

means, “the traffic in wealth is all over India”. By substituting the word

“Jagat” for “Bharat”, Spivak created a phonetically similar phrase, through

which a different interpretation can be accessed, i.e. “The traffic in wealth is

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all over the globe” (Jagat jhora hoye Dolouti). The global capitalist

economy and the international division of labour has resulted in the

woman‟s body becoming a site of exploitation, both in pre- as well as post-

independent India.

Spivak asserts that, “it is the working class women of Third World

countries who are the worst victims of the international division of labour”

(Spivak, Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value). To support this

she compares the profits of a large multinational corporation with the

income of a woman in Sri Lanka:

“Whereas Lehman Brothers, thanks to computers, earned about $2 million

for fifteen minutes of work, the entire economic text would not be what it is

it could not write itself as a palimpsest upon another text where a woman in

Sri Lanka has to work 2,287 minutes to buy a T-shirt. The „post-modern‟

and „pre-modern‟ are inscribed together.” (Spivak, Scattered Speculations on

the Question of Value, 1987,171)

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of the

erstwhile Socialist states into the global capitalist economy, many critics and

commentators felt that Marx‟s analysis of Capitalism was incorrect and that

Marx had become irrelevant. Spivak however, shows us the relevance of

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Marx in her essay “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” in

which she includes an analysis of the ideas of Hegel and Marx. While Hegel

believed that Reality was a historical process, continuously changing

through dialectics, and that these processes were happening through the

„geist‟/Spirit/Mind; Marx was a materialist and believed that change,

through dialectics, takes place through something material. Marx was

critical of Hegel‟s model of dialectical thinking which mystified the social

and economic relations. Unlike Hegel who believed that alienation could be

resolved through idealism, Marx believed that alienation, which was a

product of the conflict between the ruling and subordinate classes, tried to

show that the structural contradictions in capitalism would eventually lead to

its destruction and thus emancipate all human subjects.

This prediction of Marx did not come true, and the communist bloc

collapsed. Spivak, however, is of the opinion that Marx‟s writings on Value

have great significance in the contemporary world. Spivak, “The

Postcolonial Critic”, while commenting on Marx‟s Theory of Value as stated

in Capital volume I, says, “There is a possibility of suggesting to the worker

that the worker produces capital because the worker, the container of labour

power, is the source of value”. By the same logic, Spivak argues that it is

now possible to suggest to the Third World worker that it produces capital
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because it is the source of labour power, and is therefore a source of value,

and most significantly, that this third world worker is the possibility of the

cultural representation of the first world. However, since, as Marx noted,

the value of a commodity is not based on its use or any inherent property,

but rather by its exchange value alone; and since capitalism is only

interested in the exchange value/profit, the actual human labour that is

necessary to produce a commodity is effaced when the product is being

exchanged. An example of this process of abstraction is the production of

Nike shoes, where the difference between the use value and exchange value

is huge. The production/manufacturing units of these shoes are located in

Third World counties like China and Indonesia, and the labour force is

mostly made up of poor women who work in these sweaty units. In contrast,

the finished product, when branded, appears as a magical object, glorified

through mass media advertisements, completely disembodied and abstracted

from the actual sweated labour conditions in which they are produced.

In the process of this abstraction, there is a residue which Marx

describes as phantom-like because it goes beyond our rational

understanding. It is this aspect of the phantom-like, or ghostly presence of

human labour that Spivak foregrounds in her critique of Marx‟s historical

narrative of progress. According to Marx, the conflict between the worker

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and the capitalist will be resolved when Socialism overthrows Capitalism at

some point in the future. Spivak is critical of this logic of

conflict/contradiction between Capitalism and Socialism which Marx

considers as a stable opposition. By using deconstruction, Spivak

emphasises that, “the ghostly presence of human labour operates as the

possibility of an indeterminacy” (Spivak, Scattered Speculations on the

Question of Value, 161), Spivak tears down the opposition between „use

value‟ that is described as a pure, unalienated expression of the worker‟s

labour power; and, „exchange value‟ that is labelled as a corrupt alienating

representation of capitalist exploitation. Spivak suggests that „use value‟ is

an inextricable part of „exchange value‟, and that this sphere of exchange

and capital circulation is haunted by the ghost of labour and the productive

body of the worker. Also, through in her close and careful reading of Marx‟s

labour theory of Value, Spivak brings out its relevance in contemporary

times when global capitalism attempts to efface the use value of the third

World woman‟s labour power. She reminds us that, “it is the Third World

which produces the wealth and the possibility of the cultural self-

representation of the First World” (Spivak, The Post Colonial Critic,

1990,96).
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In her essay “Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida”, Spivak

writes: “There is no philosophical injustice in the capital relation. Capital is

only the supplement of the natural and rational teleology of the body, of its

irreducible capacity for superadequation, which it uses as its use value.”

What she means is that the capitalist simply makes use of the worker‟s

natural surplus energy to make a profit for himself, since the worker always

works more than the compensation that he gets for it. Besides, the worker is

not being forced to work, but goes there to sell her surplus labour power out

of her own free will. All Spivak is trying to prove by stating this is that

Marxism cannot account for the social injustice of capitalism in terms of its

own philosophical system. It is for this reason that Spivak uses the

deconstructive approach for her reading of Marx, because deconstruction is

concerned with the impossible concepts like „justice‟, „ethics‟ and „value‟.

Spivak thus disrupts the secure and stable opposition Socialism and

Capitalism arguing that, “Socialism is not in opposition to the form of the

capitalist mode of production. It is rather a constant pushing away – a

differing and a deferral – of the capitalist harnessing of the social

productivity of capital.” (Spivak, Supplementing Marxism, 1995, 119).

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Spivak‟s own position as a Third World woman living and writing

from the First World on the subject of Marx‟s labour theory of value in

relation to the contemporary global economic system, is of greater political

importance than a First World writer doing this, since they would be writing

from the First World perspective whereas Spivak is able to write from both

these standpoints. Even when Western thinkers write about non-western

economies, they view them only as primitive conceptual objects that are

used for theorising. What is ignored is the fact that these Third World

economies, because of globalisation and the international division of labour,

have now become a part of the First World.

In her essay “Ghostwriting” (1995), Spivak urges the Third World to

think of an alternative to Capitalism/Socialism, especially since the ideals of

a New International since the Bandung Conference, have proved useless for

the Third World, and have in some ways legalised the economic exploitation

of lower-class women through GATT and WTO. Spivak‟s reading of Marx

is not merely a corrective to his thinking but is also loud reminder of the

oppression and exploitation of the Third World woman-worker.

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Chapter IV

Spivak and Deconstruction

Spivak was catapulted to international fame with her translation of

Jacques Derrida‟s de la Grammatologie in the year 1976. Besides

introducing Derrida to an English speaking audience, Spivak, with her

“Translator‟s Preface”, set a new standard for Prefaces and Introductions.

Spivak‟s thought and writings have been strongly influenced by

deconstruction. She makes a careful reading of the concepts in Derrida‟s

thought and uses the theoretical vocabulary and conceptual framework that it

provides to question some of the philosophical traditions that we take for

granted.

Spivak explains her affinity to Derrida‟s deconstruction strategies in

an interview with Elizabeth Grosz where she says, “Where I was brought up

– when I first read Derrida, I didn‟t know who he was. I was very interested

to see that he was actually dismantling the philosophical tradition from

inside rather than outside, because of course we were brought up in an

education system in India where the name of the hero of that philosophical

system was the universal human being, and we were taught that if we could

begin to approach an internalisation of that human being, then we would be

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human. When I saw in France someone was actually trying to dismantle the

tradition which had told us what would make us human, that seemed

interesting too.” (Spivak. “Criticism, Feminism, and The

Institution”,1990,7).

The Algerian war of independence (1954-62) did have a great deal of

influence on the development of many French poststructuralist theories

including that of Jacques Derrida who was a Sephardic Jew, originally from

Algiers. This war was a revelation of sorts for many French intellectuals

about the freedom and sovereignty of the human subject in western liberal

democracies like France which they saw was made possible through

colonialist exploitation and capitalist expansion. The clear conclusion from

this premise was that the freedom and sovereignty of the First World human

subject depended on the exploitation and oppression of the Third World

people who were colonised by them. This struck at the very foundations of

the philosophy that considered the possibility of universal human rights,

freedom and equality as political goals. This aspect of Derrida‟s thinking

that undid the basis for European colonialism is what attracted Spivak to

deconstruction and could have been a major influence on the process of

decolonisation and anti-colonial resistance.

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In order to understand Spivak‟s arguments and her readings of

Derrida, it is essential to come to grips with the terms of deconstruction used

by Derrida despite even though, by its very nature, deconstruction does not

lend itself easily to strict definitions. Derrida, through many of his works,

and particularly his Letter to a Japanese Friend tries to provide an

explanation of what deconstruction is. From these writings emerge three key

features of deconstruction: (1) “Logocentrism”, which refers to our desire to

have a centre, or focal point, to structure our understanding; (2) “Nothing

beyond the Text”, which implies the reduction of meaning to set definitions

that are committed to writing; and (3) “differance”, where reduction of

meaning to writing captures opposition within that concept itself.

According to Derrida, Western philosophical tradition uses terms like

“logocentrism” meaning emphasis or privileging of Speech;

“phallogocentrism” meaning privileging men over women (patriarchy); and,

“metaphysics of presence” in which that which „is‟/that which appears, is

privileged, while the conditions for making this presence possible are

ignored. Derrida brings together all these denigrating terms under the rubric

of the term “metaphysics” which he defines in the Afterword to “Limited

Inc” as: “The enterprise of returning „strategically‟, „ideally‟, to an origin or

to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-

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identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication,

deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau,

Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be

before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the

simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated

before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture

among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most

constant, most profound and most potent”(Derrida. Limited Inc). What can

be understood from this is that metaphysics has been involved in

establishing hierarchies in the dualisms that it considers. For example, it

prioritises Presence and Purity while subordinating the contingent and the

complicated, thus resulting in the subordinate being considered as a mere

aberration that does not deserve philosophical analysis. Thus metaphysical

thought can be seen as privileging one side of a dualism while ignoring or

marginalising the alternative term. Derrida stresses the fact that in these

dualisms, the opposition of metaphysical concepts is never face-to-face;

rather, it is hierarchical. Deconstruction therefore does not immediately

neutralise these oppositions but very gradually works towards a general

displacement of the system and attempts to invert these hierarchies by

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researching and understanding the conditions due to which they were

established.

Some of the key terms from Derrida‟s work which are needed for a

better understanding of Spivak‟s writings are as follows:

1) Speech/Writing: The written word has always been denigrated by

thinkers like Plato, Rousseau, Saussure and Levi-Strauss while

privileging the spoken word. They considered speech to be a pure

conduit of meaning and writing to be a mere representation of speech.

Using deconstruction, Derrida reverses this opposition in “Of

Grammatology” by showing that “all that can be claimed of writing –

eg. That it is derivative and merely refers to other signs – is equally

true of speech”.

2) Arche – writing which is generalised notion of writing points to the

breach that the written introduces between what the writer intends to

convey and what he/she actually conveys. This, according to Derrida

is typical of an originary breach that afflicts everything, including

self-presence or speech. In case of writing, this breach reveals two

claims: spatial differing, where writing must be able to function even

when the empirically determined addressee is absent; and temporal

deferring, where the meaning of the text is never present but is

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constantly subject to the whims of the future. When the future

becomes the present, it becomes subject to yet another future. In other

words, signification always refers to other signs, and is a process of

infinite referral. The written always defers its meaning.

3) Differance, plays upon the distinction between the audible and written

in the terms used in arche – writing, i.e. “differing” and “deferring”

thus refuting Saussure‟s claim that writing is an unnecessary addition

to speech.

4) Trace refers to the idea that deconstruction‟s reversals are always

partly captured by the structure they attempt to overthrow. Mere

reversal is not enough. The governing framework and presuppositions

for the reversal should also be interrogated and challenged.

Deconstruction cannot just stop at inverting the dualism/hierarchy; it

must also corrupt and contaminate the basis of this opposition.

5) Supplement, which is an important aspect of Of Grammatology is that

which serves as an aid to something „original‟. Writing as a

supplement to speech; the contraceptive pill/condom as a supplement

to the natural method; masturbation as a supplement to sex with a

person. However, it is “undecidable” whether these supplements are

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substitutes or whether they are a plenitude enriching another

plenitude.

6) Responsibility to the Other. For Derrida. The paradox of responsible

behaviour lay in the fact that on the one hand we are to be responsible

before a singular other (eg. A loved one, God, etc.), while at the same

time we are also always referred to a responsibility towards others

generally. Derrida‟s intention is to release us from the assumption

that “responsibility” is linked only to behaviour that is possible to be

justified in the public realm (i.e. liberalism). As against this, Derrida

emphasises that the “radical singularity” of demands placed on us by

our loved ones, are also to be termed as “responsible”. Therefore the

“Ethics” that depends entirely on generality will constantly be

sacrificed in our responsibility to the “singular other”. The paradox

lies in the implication that responsibility to a particular individual is

only possible at the expense of irresponsibility to the other people.

In her preface to Derrida‟s Of Grammatology, Spivak brings out a

“geographical pattern” in the book pointing out that the first part which deals

with the deconstruction of western philosophy is related to his

deconstruction of western anthropology in the second part

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Derrida‟s Of Grammatology is shown to have a “geographical pattern” in

Spivak‟s Preface which she draws from the fact that the first part which

deals with the deconstruction of Western philosophy is related to his

deconstruction of western anthropology in the second half. It is in the

section titled “The Violence of the Letter” that Derrida points out the

ethnocentric blind spots in Levi Strauss‟ essay “A Writing Lesson” which

deals with Levi Strauss‟ anthropological fieldwork among the oral-based,

South American tribal society – the Nambikwara. From his study, he

concludes that the Nambikwara society represented an innocent people

because they were untouched by civilization and most importantly, without

writing. For Derrida, this was an instance of privileging Speech over

Writing to produce stereotypes of indigenous people as „noble savages‟.

Derrida‟s critique points out that the Nambikwara society, though unfamiliar

with the practice of writing, did use other complex and situated textual

practices which Levi Strauss‟ study had completely ignored. It is on the

basis of such studies that non-western subjects are portrayed as petrified,

mute objects denuded of culture, language and history. Spivak uses

Derrida‟s critique of Levi Strauss to emphasise the complicity of western

intellectuals in suppressing and ignoring the voices of the oppressed and the

subalterns. In the case of Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri that Spivak discusses in

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“Can the Subaltern Speak”, Spivak points out that Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri

who had been entrusted with a political assassination which she could not

carry out, committed suicide by hanging herself in her father‟s apartment.

Yet, despite being a freedom-fighter, her name does not figure in the official

male-centred historical records. Spivak contends that it is only through

deconstructive reading that the voices of such disenfranchised persons can

be brought to the fore. It is in keeping with Derrida‟s idea of being ethically

responsible to the Other that Spivak discusses the singular experiences and

histories of disenfranchised people.

Spivak uses Derrida‟s deconstruction of the proper/improper

dichotomy in Western philosophical discourse to critique the vocabularies of

political movements like feminism, Marxism and anti-colonial national

liberation. In her view, masterwords such as „the worker‟, „the woman‟ or,

„the colonised‟ are catachreses or improper words since they claim to

represent „all‟ those belonging to that group, and do not have any „true‟

examples of a „true worker‟, a „true proletarian‟ or a „true woman‟ who

could actually represent the ideals that the movement stood for. Such

masterwords, she feels, can also have an abusive effect since they represent

these groups as a coherent political identity, when in fact they were

comprised of people belonging to a different subgroups of caste, class, race

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or colour. The value of a deconstructive reading practice for Spivak is that it

guards against the universal claims of Marxism, national liberation, and

Western feminism as speaking for all the oppressed.

Spivak, in her essay, “Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida”,

reprinted in her book Outside in the Teaching Machine, states that Derrida,

in his early work was concerned with the major philosophical questions

about the founding conditions of possibility for truth, Being (ontology) and

Knowledge (epistemology). In his later work however, Derrida‟s thought

shifts towards ethical and social considerations about violence, justice,

friendship and hospitality.

Although Derrida‟s preoccupation with ethics had been implicit right

from the beginning, his version/idea of ethics is not the conventional ethics

that belongs to the realms of moral philosophy. He bases his understanding

of Ethics on the thought of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who

redefines ethics in terms of the Other. This concept of „otherness‟ in

Levinas has been summarized by Stephen Morton in his book Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak as follows:

“Throughout the history of western culture and thought, there are certain

people, concepts, and ideas that are defined as „Other‟: as monsters, aliens or
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savages who threaten the values of civilised society, or the stability of the

rational human self. Such „Others‟ have included death, the unconscious

and madness, as well as the Oriental, non-western „Other‟, the foreigner, the

homosexual, and the feminine. In the structure of western thought, the

„Other‟ is relegated to a place outside of or exterior to the normal, civilised

values of western culture; yet it is in this founding moment of relegation that

the sovereignty of the Self or the same is constituted. The challenge that

otherness or alterity poses to western thought and culture has been further

developed by Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, western philosophy has

traditionally defined the Other as an object of consciousness for the western

subject. This reductive definition has effectively destroyed the singular

alterity of the Other. Against this reduction, Levinas has asserted that the

Other always escapes the consciousness and control of the western self. For

Levinas, the challenge that the alterity of the Other poses to the certainty of

the Self in the face-to-face encounter between the Self and the Other, opens

the question of ethics”. (Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 37)

However, according to Derrida, it cannot be guaranteed that, when the

self encounters the Other, a necessarily ethical relation will take place. It

can so happen that the self injures, or even kills the Other; or, that this

encounter might result in the destruction of the singular voice and

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experience of the Other. But deconstruction takes this risk in the hope that

such an experience will transform the structure of discourse itself by shifting

the focus from the Self to the Other.

Spivak endorses view that in order to locate and define the conditions

that allowed the appearance of philosophical truths, it is necessary to inhabit

the very structures of these philosophical texts so that it becomes possible to

trace from within, those figures, histories and people who have been

excluded from the foundation of western philosophical discourse. Her

essay, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” suggests, on

similar lines, that Derrida‟s strategy of reading with literary and historical

discourse rather than taking an objective position, thought it can be misread

as theory being complicit with its object of critique, is in fact the greatest gift

of deconstruction because it “questions the authority of the investigating

subject without paralysing him” (Spivak. “Speculations on reading Marx

after Derrida”,1987,201 ).

Examples of this can be seen in Spivak‟s essay “A Literary

representation of the Subaltern” in which, through the character of Jashoda

from Mahasweta Devi‟s story “Breast Giver”, she shows how women,

particularly subaltern women, were short-changed by the leaders of the anti-

colonial resistance movement who despite wholeheartedly participating in

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the freedom struggle did not benefit in terms of their emancipation since the

leaders prioritised the independence struggle against the British over the

women‟s struggle against patriarchy. After independence, their contribution

was forgotten /ignored and they were pushed back into the domestic sphere.

The mythology of Mother India that was used to create a sense of coherence

and nationalism, completely ignored the plight of subaltern women as can be

seen in Spivak‟s analysis of Mahasweta Devi‟s “Breast Giver”. Jashoda‟s

exploited and diseased and neglected maternal body stands in sharp contrast

to the lofty democratic promises made by the nationalist movement. Using

the deconstructive approach, Spivak emphasises how Jashoda‟s exclusion

from the foundations of national independence, goes on to demonstrate how

decolonisation replicated the same colonial structures of class and gender

oppression that it had set out to oppose. Spivak makes a similar argument in

her essay “Imperialism and Sexual Difference” where she is critical of the

Western feminists who ignore the specific and peculiar problems and

experiences of Third World Women. Her argument is that Western feminism

has focussed on the exclusion of women from the masculist truth-claims to

universality. This implied that women all over the world suffer from the

same kind of oppression simply because they were women. Spivak‟s

deconstructive approach reveals that Western feminism repeats the

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oppression towards non-western women by excluding and ignoring them.

These examples demonstrate the risk of dominant political and social

movements becoming complicit with the very same political structures it

seems to oppose. It is in these situations that the value of deconstructive

reading is recognised.

In her Translator‟s Preface to Imaginary Maps, Spivak states that

since there is no precedent or prior example to demonstrate the ethical

approach, the effort to establish ethical singularity can be extremely

painstaking. She uses Mahasweta Devi‟s short story “Pterodactly, Pirtha

and Puran” as an allegory of such an ethical relation where the journalist

Puran becomes a part of the tribe‟s ongoing historical record and responds

ethically by recognising the condition of rural tribal societies in India, and

how “the alibis of Development are used to exploit and destroy their life

system” (Spivak. Imaginary Maps). Similarly, in “A Note on the New

International”, Spivak writes about her own work in the poorest and most

neglected sections of West Bengal and Bangladesh where wretchedness is

considered normal. In communities that have been damaged by centuries of

epistemic violence, real mind-changing work that will be lasting, is a slow

and painstaking process. Despite being aware of the political urgency, she
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advocates slow reading, and makes an earnest plea for learning to learn from

the subaltern rather than opting for the easier way of speaking for them.

Derrida‟s notion of undecidability puts deconstruction in danger of

becoming a formal abstraction. Spivak however, as she states in “Strategy,

Identity, Writing”, employs “the affirmative mode of deconstruction that

obliges you to say yes to that which interrupts your project, to the political

that interrupts theory” (Spivak. “Strategy, Identity, Writing”, 1990,47).

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Chapter V

Spivak and Subaltern Studies

The word subaltern was first used in a non-military sense by Marxist

Antonio Gramsci who used it under duress and censorship when he was in

prison. In his prison diaries, he called Marxism “monism” and the

proletarian, was referred to as “subaltern”. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who

is deeply involved in an attempt to devise a critical vocabulary that can

appropriately describe people who do not fall under the terms of “strict class

analysis”, finds this term extremely useful in descriptions of the lives and

histories of the category of persons who have been ignored, forgotten or

dispossessed, either by European colonialism or by the anti-colonial national

independence movements. Spivak‟s struggle to find a new vocabulary is

motivated by her dissatisfaction with master words such as “the colonised”,

“woman” or “the worker”, since she feels that such words are not flexible

enough to accommodate social identities and struggles of marginalised

groups.

Gramsci‟s account of the subaltern is significant since he draws a

parallel between the division of labour in Mussolini‟s Italy and the colonial

division of labour in India. He was convinced that the peasants would

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subvert their oppression by striking an alliance with the urban working class

or by developing a sense of their own class consciousness. This notion is

similar to that of Marx who stated that the industrial working class carried

within themselves the potential for social and political change. However the

difference was in Marx‟s industrial working class being unified and

coherent, whereas, Gramsci‟s rural peasantry lacked such a unified and

coherent identity. It is this description of the „subaltern‟ as lacking a

coherent political identity that defines Spivak‟s discussion of the subaltern.

Antonio Gramsci‟s account of the rural peasantry in Italian history,

alongwith the work of the Subaltern Studies collective in India provides the

two main resources for Spivak‟s discussion of subalternity with the former

providing the theoretical resource and the latter providing the historical

resources.

The objective of the Subaltern Studies Historians: Shahid Amin,

David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, Ranajit Guha and

Gyanendra Pandey, was to try and recover a history of subaltern agency and

resistance from the perspective of the common man. This differed from the

earlier histories of the rural peasants that had traditionally been recorded by

the colonial administrations, (as found in their archives), and later

documentations were made by the educated Indian middle class elite.

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Ranajit Guha states in his On Some Aspects of the Historiography of

Colonial India:

“The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time

been dominated by elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism. Both

originated as the ideological product of British rule in India, but have

survived the transfer of power and have been assimilated to neo-

colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of discourse in Britain and India

respectively” (Guha, 37).

The problem with such histories was that they were written from the

perspective of either the coloniser or the elite urban to suit the interests of

the ruling power. The lives and political agencies of the rural peasantry lost

their complex identity as localised resistance movements and became a

small subordinate, negligible part of the larger project of decolonisation.

What spurred the Subaltern Studies historians to rethink the narrative of the

Indian national independence movement from the subaltern point of view

was the success of the Naxalbari rural peasant rebellion in 1967. This

motivated the Subaltern Studies historians to try and reconstruct the history

of subaltern insurgency as different and independent of the bourgeois

nationalist freedom movement. However, the biggest difficulty for them

was the lack of any reliable historical record that told about the subaltern‟s
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social conditions and practices in their own terms. When confronted with

this difficulty, the Subaltern Studies historians inverted the reading and

search process and tried to recuperate the political will, agency and voice of

the subaltern by critiquing representations of the subaltern in the histories

written by the elite. This approach used by the Subaltern Studies historians,

Spivak suggests, has a clear political agenda: just as the voice of the

subaltern could not be traced or recovered from the archives of elite

nationalist histories because it was left out; the kind of reading that was

undertaken by the Subaltern Studies Historians could succeed in reinscribing

these subaltern histories into the dominant historical representation.

Acknowledging that a classic Marxist notion of history forms the

theoretical basis of the Subaltern Studies historians‟ work on the history of

subaltern insurgency, Spivak questions their use of Marxist methodology in

this project since, in her opinion, the categories of Marxist thought are too

narrow. However, instead of outrightly rejecting the Marxist methodology

and the work of the Subaltern Studies Historians, she expands the scope of

the study to include other forms of liberation struggles like the women‟s

movement, peasant rebellions and, fights for the rights of tribals/indigeneous

minorities. For Spivak, the historical research of the Subaltern Studies

collective will be able to reflect, in a better way, the complexities of Indian

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social history, if it traces a series of “political confrontations between

dominant and exploited groups rather than simply noting the transition from

„semi-feudalism into capitalist subjection” ( Spivak, In Other Worlds, 197).

Spivak‟s shifting of the focus of Subaltern Studies from the national

liberation movement to the smaller social movements obviously necessitates

a corresponding shift in the methodology to be used. The Marxist approach

cannot be used in Subaltern Studies since subaltern groups, rather than being

unified and cohesive, are complex and differentiated. It is for this reason

that Spivak suggests deconstruction as a more appropriate approach. The

introduction of the deconstructive approach for the Subaltern Studies project

has been controversial, and Spivak has been accused of imposing an elite

western academic language on to the history of subaltern insurgency.

However, Spivak has defended her use of deconstruction which in her

opinion goes to the very roots of the issue, i.e. the construction of the

subaltern subject.

Spivak‟s main objection is to the idea prevalent in the early Subaltern

Studies methodology that the subaltern is a sovereign political subject who is

fully in control of her own destiny. She accuses the Subaltern Studies

historians of locating a „will‟ as the sovereign cause of insurgency, when in

actuality, the subaltern subject is an effect of the dominant discourse of the

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elite. Although it seems that such an argument removes the ground for

effective political struggle since the subaltern subject is merely a discursive

effect, yet, deconstructive reading by Spivak succeeds in placing emphasis

on the way in which the subaltern subject has been constructed through the

dominant discourse of elite nationalism.. This reading by Spivak resists the

claims of the elite group to represent India/the nation as a coherent, unified

and objective structure, when what it is in reality is “a continuous sign

chain” or a network of traces. (Spivak, In Other Worlds 1987.198).

Although her use of deconstructive strategies may brand Spivak as

somebody who is not really concerned or interested in native agency, yet, by

invoking the fiction of Mahasweta Devi, she suggests that, “Literary texts

can provide an alternative rhetorical site for articulating the histories of

subaltern women.” (Spivak. “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A

Woman‟s Text from the Third World”.) Spivak turns to literary texts for

instances of subaltern women‟s agency because she feels that official

historical discourse privileges Men as major characters in the political scene

in India. Female characters like Dopdi Mejhen (“Draupadi”) and Mary

Oraon (“The Hunt”) are examples of the woman‟s struggles within the

revolution in a shifting historical moment.

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The use of deconstruction as a strategy for locating and reading

instances of subaltern insurgency puts the lives and struggles of the subaltern

groups in danger of being reduced to pages in a book. However, these are

not mere pages in book, but, to use Derrida‟s description – a text that is

made meaningful by a system of signs or codes. Intellectuals are an

important part of the larger social text that they describe. Using the Marxist

methodology would compel Spivak to locate a subaltern consciousness in a

pure and positive state and subsequently „objectify‟ the subaltern by

controlling him through knowledge after having restored versions of

causality and self determination to him. Knowing this to be impossible and

unattainable, Spivak prefers the deconstructive approach which she uses in

order to expand and deepen the Marxist approach so that it can include

women, rural peasants and the urban proletariat and tribals. This approach is

more uplifting and hopeful since by including those who had never been

included, it offers hope and optimism to the hopeless.

Spivak‟s 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” deals with the manner

in which Western cultures investigate other cultures and the related ethical

problems of investigating a different culture based on „universal‟ concepts

and frameworks. The basic claim that this essay makes is that Western

academic thinking is produced in order to support Western economic

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interests. Spivak contends that knowledge is never innocent, rather it always

expresses the interests of its producers. To substantiate this argument,

Spivak examines the claims of Foucault and Deleuze to speak for the

disenfranchised, along with the self-righteous claims of the white colonial to

rescue the brown woman from the barbaric act of self-immolation (sati). In

both these cases, it is the Western man who is speaking for the subaltern

woman while she herself is silenced. Spivak‟s most important concern being

that of political representation of the subaltern, she is critical of the fact that

Foucault and Deleuze, when discussing real, historical examples of social

and political struggle, use the transparent model of representation in which,

“oppressed subjects speak, act and know their own conditions” (“Spivak.

Can the Subaltern Speak?”) thus ignoring the epistemic violence of

imperialism wherein the imperialist powers created structures of knowledge

which silenced actual experience of the colonised peoples. The case of the

Rani of Sirmur is another example of how the woman is written into history

when required by the coloniser, and then vanishes when she is not longer

important to their economic interests. Sirmur, in the North of India was of

immense strategic and political importance to the East India Company.

Karma Prakash was its Raja. During the 1840‟s, at the time when India was

going through the phase of transition from the deregulated economic control
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of the East India Company to the colonial rule of the British government, it

became very important for the British to annex Sirmur in order to secure its

trade routes against Nepal. So the king was branded “barbaric and

dissolute” in order to make it easy for them to depose him. They crowned

his minor son Fatteh Prakash as king and appointed the Rani of Sirmur as

the young king‟s guardian, ostensibly because there was no trustworthy male

relative, but more because it would be easy for the British to manipulate the

Rani. In her essay “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”,

Spivak concludes that, “The Rani emerges only when she is needed in the

space of imperial production”.

“Can the Subaltern Speak” also analyses the 19 th century ideological

debate over sati as an example of a situation when two “male” visions were

involved in a conflict where women remained silent subalterns. Spivak also

analyses „jauhar‟ as another phenomenon by which men reinforce their rule

and possession of women, and objectify them. Patriotic stories of mass self-

immolation serve to impose gender categories from early childhood which

create a lasting imprint in the minds of women. Spivak‟s detailed analysis of

sati reveals that a woman who performed widow-sacrifice did it as part of

the conduct of a „good wife‟. Since sati was not prescribed by the Hindu

religious code, a woman‟s act of sati became an expression of free will to be

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seen as a „good wife‟. In other words, sati was symbolic of good wifely

conduct. Here Spivak quickly clarifies that she is not supporting sati or

violence, but is merely demonstrating how the British colonials were unable

to pick up this peculiar sense of the practice of sati. They only used it to

highlight the abhorrent and inhuman characteristics of Hindu society. The

abolition of sati was imposed in such terms and cultural categories that it

didn‟t really liberate women, but simply changed modes and models of male

domination. By representing India as barbaric and backward, and abolishing

the practice of sati, the British were able to show themselves as possessing a

superior and more humane moral culture thus giving impetus and

justification to their claims of imperialism as an act of civilizing the

barbarians.

In the third part of her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak tells

us about Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri, a young Bengali upper middle class

woman who one day hangs herself to death in her father‟s apartment.

Several years later it was discovered that she was a member of an armed

group that was part of the Indian independence struggle who committed

suicide since she was unable to bring herself to carry out a violent

assignment (killing) that was entrusted to her. Despite all the care she takes

in timing her suicide to coincide with her menstrual cycle so that her act is
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not misunderstood as a case of an illicit love affair gone wrong, yet, her

message is not heard or understood. Even her believe her death to be the

consequence of illicit love, and hence a source of shame for the family.

Though Bhubaneshwari was a politically committed and brave participant in

the struggle for Indian independence, yet, argues Spivak, “as a model of

interventionist practice, Bhubaneshwari‟s attempt to rewrite the text of sati-

suicide is a tragic failure”. Much like a palimpsest, Bhubaneshwari

Bhaduri‟s voice and story is erased, and the supplementary narratives as

given by others are written over it. In this context, Spivak states in an

interview with Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean published in “The Spivak

Reader”: “ „The subaltern cannot speak‟ means that even when the subaltern

makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard, and

speaking and hearing complete the speech act. That‟s what it had meant,

and anguish marked the spot.” Therefore, the subalterns do speak. But since

Spivak is concerned with the political representation of the subaltern, these

speech acts are meaningless since they are not recognised as speech acts

within the dominant political systems of representation.

Spivak‟s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” moves away from the

Subaltern Studies project in its focus on the historical experiences of the

subaltern woman as against the objective of the Subaltern Studies historians

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whose focus was on the national independence narrative from the point of

view of the subaltern. However, Spivak‟s engagement with the histories of

disempowered subaltern women, while expanding the scope of the term, also

alters and complicates its, since in Spivak‟s use, the term would also include

upper middle class women, peasant women and also women from the sub-

proletariat. Nevertheless, what seems most important for Spivak is the fact

that the active involvement of women in the anti-colonial struggle has been

excluded from the official history of national independence. To Spivak, this

amounts to double effacement; as a subaltern, and also as a woman. As she

writes in the essay: “Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the

track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. The question is not of female

participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of

labour, for both of which there is „evidence‟. It is, rather, that, both as object

of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological

construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If in the context of

colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the

subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” (Spivak. Can the

Subaltern Speak?, 1988,287)

In response to Neil Lazarus‟ allegation that although she commits to

investigating the histories of subaltern women‟s insurgency, it is not

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followed up by any concrete historical research, Spivak blames this on the

ideological construction of gender in the colonial historical archives that

keep the male dominant. She overcomes this with her readings of literary

texts from the Third World, particularly those of Mahasweta Devi whose

characters provide a counterpoint to the silencing and erasure of the

subaltern characters, particularly women, in the colonial archives and elite

nationalist history of India.

In the true spirit of deconstruction, Spivak does not offer a neat

formula for the emancipation of subaltern women. What she offers is hope.

By using deconstruction, Spivak creates a reading strategy that may perhaps

enable us to hear, recognise and understand the voice of the subaltern.

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Chapter VI

Spivak and Postcolonialism

Post-colonial Studies: Key concepts defines Post-colonialism (or often

postcolonialism) as “dealing with the effects of colonization on cultures and

societies. As originally used by historians after the Second World War in

terms such as „the post-colonial state‟, „post-colonial‟ had a clearly

chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period.

However, from the late 1970‟s the term has been used by literary critic to

discuss the various cultural effects of colonization.”(Bill Ashcroft, et al.

Post-colonial Studies: Key concepts)

Stephen Slemon in his essay “The Scramble for Post-colonialism”

published in “The Post-colonial Studies Reader states, “Post-colonialism, as

it is now used in its various fields, de-scribes a remarkably heterogeneous set

of subject positions, professional fields, and critical enterprises. It has been

used as a way of ordering a critique of totalising forms of Western

historicism; as a portmanteau term for a retooled notion of „class‟, as a

subset of both postmodernism and post-structuralism; as the name for a

condition of nativist longing in post-independence national groupings; as a

cultural marker of non-residency for a third-world intellectual cadre; as the

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inevitable underside of a fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist

power; as an oppositional form of „reading practice‟; and as the name for a

category of „literary‟ activity which sprang from a new and welcome

political energy going on within what used to be called „commonwealth‟

literary studies.” ( Stephen Slemon. The Scramble for Post-colonialism).

The three major exponents of colonial discourse theory are Edward

Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Unlike Said who

focussed on dominant European literary texts, Spivak‟s focus extends to

postcolonial literary texts that question and challenge the colonial master

narratives like Bronte‟s Jane Eyre and Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe, the works

of Assia Djebar, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Mahasweta Devi, Jean

Rhys and J.M. Coetzee. But Spivak joins Edward Said and Homi Bhabha in

emphatically reiterating that there was a definite and close link between

nineteenth century English Literature and the history of Imperialism.

Spivak, in the first paragraph of Chapter I of her Critique of

Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present writes:

Colonial discourse studies, when they concentrate only on the representation

of the colonized or the matter of the colonies, can sometimes serve the

production of current neo-colonial knowledge by placing

colonialism/imperialism securely in the past, and/or by suggesting a

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continuous line from that past to our present. This situation complicates the

fact that postcolonial/colonal discourse studies is becoming a substantial

subdisciplinary ghetto. In spite of the potential for cooptation, however,

there can be no doubt that the apparently crystalline disciplinary mainstream

runs muddy if these studies do not provide a persistent dredging operation.

Because this dredging is counterproductive when it becomes a constant and

self-righteous shaming of fully intending subjects, deconstruction can help

here.” (Spivak. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason). Spivak therefore uses

the deconstructive approach in her critique of colonial discourse.

The British managed to maintain their hold in India during the

Nineteenth Century not just by threatening the natives with military force,

but by using rhetoric to convince the upper middle class Indians that the

British culture was better and superior than theirs. Once they succeeded in

convincing the middle class elite about their superiority, they were able to

govern India by consent rather than by force. Western Culture, in particular,

Literature and Philosophy, provided the basis, not just for occupation, but

for western colonial expansion. Using the deconstructive approach of Paul

de Man, Spivak argues that, “the basis of a truth claim is no more than a

trope” (Spivak. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason). In classical rhetoric, a

trope is a figure of speech in which one thing is used to talk about another.
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According to Paul de Man, the discovery that something that claims to be

true is a mere trope is the first (tropological) step in what he calls

deconstruction. The second (performative) step is to disclose how the

corrective impulse within the tropologial analysis is obliged to act out a lie

in attempting to establish it as the corrected version of truth. For de Man,

Philosophical truth claims are marked and constituted by the effacement of

tropes. On the basis of this, Spivak suggests that the production of truth

claims by the suppression of rhetoric can have extremely damaging

consequences in a broader social and political field. In her A Critique of

Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present Spivak

argues that since deconstruction is concerned with the constitution of truth in

philosophical discourse, it can be usefully applied to the “axiomatics of

imperialism”. She then proceeds to use this strategy in her reading of the

eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant. By placing the three

Critiques in the broad historical and geographical context of imperial

expansion, she carefully follows Kant‟s rhetoric and focuses on the ideas,

concepts and metaphors that are deployed as the truth. In keeping with Paul

de Man‟s argument that the rhetorical character of of all language (whether

philosophical or literary) opens up the possibility of misunderstanding,

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Spivak declares in advance, that her reading of Kant too will be a

misreading.

Through her deconstructive reading strategy that was influenced by

the thought of Paul de Man, Spivak concludes that the lie performed by Kant

to define the rational human subject in his “Critique of Judgement”, involves

the erasure of a racialised figure. The reading strategy and arguments that

lead Spivak to draw this conclusion have been summarised by Stephen

Morton as follows:

“Spivak begins her reading of Kant by summarising the key

philosophical arguments of Kant‟s three Critiques: Kant‟s Critique of Pure

Reason charts the operation of the reason that cognizes nature theoretically.

The Critique of Practical Reason charts the operation of the rational will.

The operations of the aesthetic judgement [in The Critique of Judgement]

allow the play of concepts of nature with concepts of freedom (Spivak, A

Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing

Present). Spivak suggests that there is an irreconcilable contradiction

between The Critique of Pure Reason and, where the moral subject is bound

to the determining structures of reason: „The human being is moral only

insofar as he cannot cognize himself‟ (Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial

Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present,22). Kant attempted to

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resolve this contradiction through the aesthetic category of the Sublime. In

The Critique of Practical Reason Kant‟s philosophical schema, the Sublime

refers to the feeling of pain that occurs when the individual human

imagination encounters itself in relationship to the non-representable

magnitude of the natural world, yet is able to conquer this feeling of pain

through recourse to the rational faculties of the human mind. In other words,

the sublime provides an aesthetic structure for rational and cultivated human

subjects to conquer their fear of unrepresentable concepts such as the Infinite

and Death. One of the fundamental rational faculties that Kant invokes in his

discussion of the sublime is that of Culture. In The Critique of Judgement,

Kant argues that it is primarily cultivated and educated men who can make

judgements about taste and sublimity. For Spivak, this moment in Kant‟s

argument is particularly revealing because it raises questions about those

groups and societies who do not have access to the culture that Kant is

describing. For if the moral subject needed culture to define his cognitive

limitations in the face of the infinite structure of the sublime, what happens

to those subjects who do not have access to Kant‟s understanding of

morality or culture? As Spivak argues, Kant‟s reading of the sublime

presented itself differently to those people who were not represented as

moral subjects within Kant‟s European philosophical system: „Without

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development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call

sublime presents itself to man in the raw [dem rohen Menschen] merely as

terrible‟ (cited in Spivak 1999: 12–13) (Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial

Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present). Spivak picks up on the

German adjective „roh‟ in Kant‟s text, noting that while it is normally

translated as „uneducated‟, the term „uneducated‟ in Kant‟s work specifically

refers to „the child and the poor‟; the „naturally uneducable‟ refers to

women; and „dem rohen Menschen, man in the raw‟, connotes „the savage

and the primitive‟ (Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a

History of the Vanishing Present). Spivak further proceeds to argue that

Kant‟s theory of the universal subject, or „Man‟, does not refer to all

humanity, but only refers to the educated, bourgeois, masculine subject of

the European enlightenment. Citing a passage from Kant‟s discussion of the

sublime in The Critique of Judgement, Spivak notes how Kant excluded the

„Australian aborigine or the man from Tierra del Fuego‟ from the category

of human subjectivity in his analytic of the sublime. By so doing, Spivak

links Kant‟s philosophical discussion of the „raw man‟ in his account of the

Sublime to the „axiomatics of imperialism‟: „we find here the axiomatics of

imperialism as a natural argument to indicate the limits of the cognition of

(cultural) man‟ (Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a

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History of the Vanishing Present). For Spivak, the „axiomatics of

imperialism‟ refers to the self-evident truth, which western imperialism

claims as its self-justifying basis. Spivak thus suggests that the narrow

European-centred definition of the moral subject in the world of Kant‟s three

Critiques provides some of the rational principles for imperial expansion.

Kant‟s argument that only cultivated and educated European men have

access to the sublime, while non-European subjects are stripped of culture or

humanity and relegated to the place of an unrepresentable, irrational other, is

an interesting case in point. For it is precisely because of this narrow,

European-centred definition of the moral subject that Kant‟s philosophical

narrative could serve to justify the idea of western imperialism as a

civilizing mission.” (Morton, 116)

Spivak‟s essay “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”

published in 1985, examines Charlotte Bronte‟s “Jane Eyre”, Daniel Defoe‟s

“Robinson Crusoe” and Mary Shelley‟s “Frankenstein”. Very significantly,

Spivak‟s reading of Kant‟s Critiques as the justification of the civilizing

mission of Western imperialism is prefigured in this essay. This is especially

borne out in Bronte‟s “Jane Eyre”. At one level, the novel narrates the

trajectory of the education and development of the white English bourgeois

female protagonist Jane, who succeeds in retaining her strong female

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individualism within the restricted space of nineteenth century domestic life.

Spivak, in her reading of the novel argues that Jane‟s narrative of female

individualism is achieved at the expense of another female character,

Rochester‟s first wife Bertha Mason. Bertha is portrayed in the novel as a

sub-human subject, denuded of any history or culture. She was married to

Edward Rochester during his stay in Jamaica, and when they moved to

England (Thornfield Hall), Bertha is locked up in the attic and denied full

access to the category of the human subject. Spivak compels us to read

carefully the imperialist sub-text of the novel that denies Bertha the status of

a human being. She insists that Bertha is “a figure produced by the

axiomatic of imperialism” (Spivak, “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism”), where the civilizing mission of imperialism is a divine

injunction rather than a human motive. Spivak links this ethical principle to

Kant‟s account of the categorical imperative, i.e. “the universal moral law,

given by pure reason” (Spivak, Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism). Spivak‟s analysis of Jane Eyre in her essay explicates how

Kant‟s philosophical statement “In all creation everything one chooses and

over which one has any power, may be used merely as means; man alone,

and with him every rational creature, is an end in himself” is transformed to

suit the purpose of imperialist expansion into “make the heathen into a
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human so he can be treated as an end in himself” (Spivak, ”Three Women‟s

Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”). Spivak therefore claims that the

European imperialists appropriated the moral imperatives of Western

philosophy and justified colonisation as a dive right.

In Jane Eyre, this divine civilizing mission is presented in the last

section where St. John Rivers, the Christian missionary proposes marriage to

Jane and wants her to be his soulmate and partner in his “great work of

bettering their race- of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance – of

substituting peace for war – freedom for bondage – religion for superstition

–the hope of heaven for the fear of hell” (Bronte cited in Spivak). In this

monologue by St. John Rivers, Indian culture is described as “a realm of

ignorance” where superstition and hell prevail thus justifying his work as a

soul-making enterprise.

Viewing the narrative of Jane Eyre from a different perspective, is

Jean Rhys‟ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1965). This novel is analysed by

Spivak in her essay “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”

as a postcolonial text, partly from the point of view of the character of

Bertha Mason. Jean Rhys shifts the location of the story to Jamaica where

the main events take place. We are introduced to a young Antoinette who is

in complete contrast to the monstrous, inhuman figure of Bertha in “Jane

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Eyre”. Rhys describes how Rochester robs Antoinette of an important part

of her personal identity by renaming her as Bertha. Rhys‟ biggest

achievement is that although the storyline is similar to that in Jane Eyre, in

her rewriting, she “keeps Bertha‟s humanity, indeed her sanity as a critic of

imperialism, intact” (Spivak, “Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism”). Rhys shows how Antoinette‟s cultural identity is not only

denied with Rochester refusing to call her Antoinette, but she also

experiences a cultural non-being when she arrives at Thornfield Hall: “What

am I doing in this place and who am I?... They tell me I am in England, but I

don‟t believe them. We lost our way to England” ( Rhys, Wide Sargasso

Sea). The figures of Bertha and Antoinette are a study in contrast. Bertha,

in Bronte‟s novel is presented in the image of a demonic, monstrous fiend; a

woman who is repressed and contained within the patriarchal confines of the

home; while the Antoinette of Rhys‟ novel; lovely with her scents and pretty

clothes, is presented as a sympathetic figure, a victim of Rochester‟s

psychological abuse. For Spivak, Rhys‟ novel Wide Sargasso Sea which

rewrites Bronte‟s Jane Eyre, underlines her idea of the “epistemic violence

of imperialism” – the Imperialism which was justified and glorified by

defining the colonial subject as inhuman, heathen or primitive.

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The second text that Spivak engages with in her essay “Three

Women‟s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” is Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson

Crusoe (1719). For postcolonial critics Defoe‟s novel is one of original

literary texts about English imperialism. Edward Said argues that it is no

accident that Daniel Defoe‟s “ prototypical modern realistic novel is about a

European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European

island” (Said, Culture and Imperialism). It is the colonizing mission, fully

justified by Kant‟s philosophical narrative that permits Robinson Crusoe “to

create a new world of his own in the distant reaches of the African, Pacific,

and Atlantic wilderness” (Said, Culture and Imperialism).

Spivak comments on Karl Marx‟s discussion of Robinson Crusoe in

his Capital Volume One, stating that his purpose was only to illustrate how

the value of different forms of productive labour is calculated according to

the time taken to complete a particular task. As Marx writes, “Necessity

itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different

kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general

activity than another depends upon the difficulties, greater or less as the case

may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This

Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger,

and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep
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a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that

belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly for

the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on average,

cost him” (Marx, Capital, Volume One). Though Spivak‟s reading of Defoe

via Marx seems unrelated, yet on closer scrutiny one finds that it is in

keeping with her argument that Marx, despite knowing about the project of

imperialism, in his discussion of Robinson Crusoe, subordinated questions

about space and imperialism, and focussed solely on the historical narrative

of European capitalism.

J.M.Coetzee‟s Foe(1986) on the other hand, says Spivak, “is more about

spacing and displacement than about timing of history and labour” (Spivak.

“Theory in the Margin: Coetzee‟s Foe reading Defoe‟s Crusoe/Roxana”.

1991). The novel Foe is woven around the existing plot of Daniel Defoe‟s

Robinson Crusoe and is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a

castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by “Cruso” and “Friday”

as their adventures were already underway. The story unfolds as Barton‟s

narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe to

help transform her tale into popular fiction.

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson performs the missionary task of the

European imperialist by teaching Friday to speak English. In Coetzee‟s Foe

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however, Friday is tongueless (his tongue having been cut off by slave

traders) and therefore cannot be taught to speak despite Susan Barton‟s best

efforts. What is being foregrounded here is the violence of colonial

education, which the earlier texts had effaced. Susan next tries to teach

Friday to write. The first word that she chooses for him to learn is „Africa‟

in the hope that this will help him assert national independence thus

challenging Defoe‟s original colonial narrative in Robinson Crusoe. Spivak

however considers the word „Africa‟ a catacheresis since it was only a time-

bound naming by the colonisers, imposed onto the continent. Despite

Susan‟s best efforts to teach Friday to write she does not succeed.

Eventually Susan gives up and concludes that it is a futile task. Spivak

considers this a highly instructive lesson for readers of postcolonial texts.

She urges us to view Friday, not as a passive victim of colonial history but

as “an agent of withholding in the text” (Spivak. “Theory in the Margin:

Coetzee‟s Foe reading Defoe‟s Crusoe/Roxana”. 1991,172). Friday, in his

refusal to write, is rejecting Susan‟s benevolent gesture of allowing him to

experience emancipation. He also refuses her ideas of nationalism and

identity. In other words, he refuses to be represented. This reading of Foe

by Spivak bears out her claim regarding the limitations of political

representation as an effective vehicle for political change. As she writes in A

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Critique of Postcolonial Reason, “Colonial Discourse studies, when they

concentrate only on the representation of the colonized or the matter of the

colonies, can sometimes serve the production of current neo-colonial

knowledge by placing colonialism/imperialism securely in the past”. This is

similar to Leela Gandhi‟s statement that postcolonialism is, “a disciplinary

project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and,

crucially, interrogating the colonial past”. Spivak‟s motive in her analysis of

postcolonial texts is to locate subaltern agency and resistance thus

challenging the totalising system of colonial discourse.

Spivak is also highly critical of political promises made in the name of

nationalism and decolonisation in the Third World Countries. For the

Subaltern women and the underclass, these mean nothing. Subaltern Studies

scholars like Partha Chatterjee, argue that nationalism is a „derivative

discourse‟ influenced by European political ideas. Spivak who has been

influenced by this argument states that on the one hand are the State political

programmes devised and implemented by the ruling governmental elites;

while on the other hand are the popular struggles of those groups who are

totally ignored by these elite political programmes. Since Nationalism is the

only discourse that is given validity and credit for achieving emancipation,

the innumerable instances of resistance by the marginalised groups are

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forcibly suppressed by the promoters of this idea of nationalism. This leaves

no space for the disadvantaged groups. Spivak suggests, that it is only

literature that can give voice and space to these subaltern groups whose

histories have been suppressed and written out of the national liberation

movements.

A very good example of this is the work of the Bengali writer

Mahasweta Devi whose works Spivak has translated. In her essay, “A

Literary Representation of the Subaltern", Spivak presents an analysis of

“Stanadayani” and “Douloti the Bountiful” as a narrative of national

independence from the perspective of a subaltern woman that challenges the

truth claims of the elite historical discourse. Mahasweta Devi in her

authorial commentary on “Stanadayani” calls the story of Jashoda “a parable

of decolonization where the maternal body of Jashoda stands as a metaphor

of the Indian nation after decolonisation. Both Jashoda and India are

mothers by hire, with all classes of people, who actually swore to protect

her, now abuse her. During the resistance movements of the freedom

struggle, powerful feminine figures from Hindu mythology like Kali, Sita,

Draupadi and Savitri were invoked in order to help define a coherent sense

of Indian nationhood. Gandhi extended the metaphor of Mother India to get

the active support of women in his program of passive resistance against the
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British. Sadly, however, though it was through a gendered discourse that

women joined the anti-colonial resistance movement, after India achieved

Independence in 1947, this did not lead to the political emancipation of

women. Instead, the goal of the political emancipation of women was

subordinated to the more immediate goal of national independence. After

independence, women‟s rights were pushed aside and women were put into

the traditional gender role of motherhood and domesticity. Spivak however,

finds that this reading ignores the subaltern status of Jashoda. She uses the

Marxist-feminist approach to show how Jashoda‟s reproductive body

becomes a site of economic exploitation in the text. “The protagonist

subaltern Jashoda, whose husband was crippled by the youngest son of a

wealthy household, becomes a wet-nurse for them. Her repeated gestation

and lactation support her husband and family. By the logic of the production

of value, they are both means of production.” (Spivak. In Other Worlds). In

Jashoda‟s sale of her maternal body to support her family, we see a reversal

of the sexual division of labour between men and women and also

problematises the male-centred definition of the working-class subject that is

central to classic European Marxism.

Though Spivak‟s translations and commentaries on Mahasweta Devi‟s

fiction are brilliant and persuasive, she has been criticised for commodifying
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Devi‟s work for an international market by inserting them into a Western

theoretical discourse which has no connection or relationship to the people

or culture depicted in it. Spivak acknowledges this difficulty and sets about

alleviating it by developing an ethics of reading that is sensitive to the social

location of subaltern woman, throwing up the possibility of an alliance

between dominant readers and texts of subalternity. Spivak‟s statement in

“A Literary Representation of the Subaltern” that, “knowledge is made

possible and is sustained by irreducible difference, not identity”, is based on

Derrida‟s notion of ethics as responsibility of the (Western) Self towards the

(non-Western) Other. However, there is no guarantee that when confronted

with the Other, there will necessarily be an ethical relation of singularity

between the Self and the Other. The problem with this kind of reading is

that it does not bring the subaltern any closer to political representation, and

negates Mahasweta Devi‟s objective of inserting the tribal people into the

mainstream. Spivak considers this a naive understanding which assumes

that literary representation will necessarily lead to political representation.

No doubt, Mahasweta Devi‟s subaltern women characters, whether it

is Jashoda or Douloti, presents to the reader the subaltern woman‟s body

revolting against the postcolonial state, yet, these are not signs of intentional

political struggle. The story “Draupadi” however, raises questions about

 149

Draupadi‟s political agency through its rewriting of the vastraharan episode

in the Mahabharata. In the Mahabharata, Draupadi‟s dignity and honour are

preserved by the divine intervention of Krishna, but in Mahasweta Devi‟s

story, Dopdi/Draupadi, “remains publicly naked at her own insistence”

(Spivak. “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern”). Despite her violent

torture, Draupadi is adamant in refusing to be clothed, threatening the

authority of the patriarchal state. Indeed, this threat to patriarchal authority

is emphasised when she reverses the interrogation protocol by questioning

her torturers instead of they questioning her: “What‟s the use of clothes?

You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?”

(Spivak “ A Literary Representation of the Subaltern”)

The moving and powerful fiction of Mahasweta Devi may not lead to

political representation for the subaltern, but according to Spivak, it serves a

larger purpose in exposing and articulating the structural barriers of class,

culture, language and literacy that have prevented, and continue to prevent

the tribal from participating in the democratic process.

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CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

This critical study has attempted to examine Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak‟s critical interventions into feminism, Marxism,

deconstruction, post-colonialism and subaltern studies, and to identify

the factors and reasons that make Spivak‟s body of work significant,

relevant and unique amidst the clamour of literary theorists. Spivak‟s

work draws from a range of different theoretical methodologies that

are often incommensurate and mutually antagonistic. Though it is

almost impossible to compartmentalise or neatly divide her work into

categories or phases, for technical reasons, the study of Spivak‟s

interventions into each of the five methodologies/strategies was

placed under separate chapter heads. I submit below my

findings/conclusions under each chapter which will be followed by

the overall general comments and conclusions pertaining to this study.

The chapter titled “Spivak and Feminism” presents Spivak‟s

argument that Western feminism has been historically complicit in the

project of imperialist expansion, and that a real feminist movement

would be one that is wary of colonial thinking in feminist scholarship.

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She also proposes the important idea of learning to learn from the

subaltern. As against the universal humanist assumption that is

prevalent in some western feminist thought, she states that all

women‟s lives and histories are not the same; the lives of non-western

women being very different from those of western women. It is for

this reason that she emphasises the importance of a „global‟ political

awareness of the „local‟ conditions that structure women‟s oppression

in different parts of the world.

The chapter “Spivak and Marxism” elucidates Spivak‟s reading of

Marx through the lens of deconstruction wherein she redefines the

political task of Marxist critique as an ethical call to read Marx

patiently and carefully. Though at times, she reads Marx more as a

philosopher than as an economist, her rethinking of Marx through

deconstruction emphasises the need to retain a sense of the economic

in contemporary cultural analysis. As a theorist whose concerns are

with the subaltern, Spivak‟s re-articulation of Marx‟s writings forces

us to acknowledge the fact that post-colonial/Third World nation

states are fully integrated into the capitalist economic system since it

is the workers, more specifically the female workers, of such Third

World countries who produce the wealth and resources for the
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powerful countries of the First World. Spivak reminds us that it is the

labour of Third World women in particular, which is exploited in the

contemporary global capitalist economy. Her objective in re-reading

Marx is not merely as a corrective, but is focussed more towards

articulating the oppressive cultural, political and economic conditions

due to which the Third World woman worker is exploited and

silenced.

Deconstruction has been the predominant influence that has shaped

Spivak‟s thought. The chapter “Spivak and Deconstruction” reveals

to us that Spivak‟s focus is more on Derrida‟s train of thought that

moves away from major ontological and epistemological questions,

towards ethical and social considerations about violence, justice,

friendship, and hospitality. Derrida concentrates on the task of

inhabiting the structures of philosophical texts to locate those histories

and people who have been excluded from western philosophical

discourse as it founding condition of possibility. Spivak uses

Derrida‟s strategy of reading literature and history to trace the

founding exclusions inherent in radical political programs such as

Marxism, decolonization or feminism.

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In the Chapter “Spivak and Subaltern Studies”, we observe that

since Spivak‟s continuous endeavour has been to find an appropriate

methodology for articulating the histories and struggles of

disempowered groups, she questions whether the Marxist

methodology used by the subaltern studies historians is appropriate to

describe the complexities of subaltern insurgency. Through her

deconstructive reading of Indian society, Spivak throws light on the

manner in which the subaltern subject is carefully constructed by the

dominant discourse as an after-effect of elite nationalism. The

subaltern is thus contained within the grand narrative of bourgeois

national liberation which ignores local uprisings/struggles of

particular subaltern groups. Spivak‟s reading however, defines the

particular struggles of women, peasants and tribals as separate from

and supplementary to the dominant historical narrative of bourgeois

national independence. Thus, Spivak succeeds in expanding and

deepening the subaltern studies historian‟s work by including groups

such as women. Spivak‟s reading of Mahasweta Devi‟s female

subaltern characters record moments of subaltern insurgency and

resistance and is an attempt to give hope to the disenfranchised by

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transforming conditions of impossibility into a condition of

possibility.

Spivak‟s most important contribution to post-colonial studies has

been to demonstrate how the institution of English Literary Studies

disseminated the idea of English imperialism. The chapter titled

“Spivak and Post-colonialism” discusses her critical engagement with

post colonial literary texts such as „Wide Sargasso Sea‟ by Jean Rhys,

and, „Foe‟ by Susan Barton as a counter-discourse to challenge the

authority of colonial master narratives in classic English literary texts

such as Charlotte Bronte‟s „Jane Eyre‟, and Daniel Defoe‟s „Robinson

Crusoe‟ while at the same time reveals Spivak‟s scepticism of the

ability of all post-colonial literature to articulate the condition of the

subaltern. Spivak therefore turns to the works of Mahasweta Devi, In

translating Devi‟s work and writing elaborate commentaries, Spivak

strives to articulate the histories and struggles of the subaltern,

especially that of subaltern women.

As can be seen from the above summaries and inferences, not only

does Spivak draw on different methodologies, but she also insists on

preserving these differences. She employs a rigorous rhetorical

strategy of interruption and supplementation which questions the

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authority and the truth claims of different theoretical methodologies.

She uses this strategy to tackle the urgent political questions about

disempowered individuals and groups such as the colonized, women

in colonial and post-colonial societies, tribal groups and the rural

peasantry in south Asia. Her commitment to give these subaltern

groups a voice can be seen as disrupting the disciplinary codes and

specialized vocabulary of western academic philosophy and critical

theory.

Judith Butler, in her response to Terry Eagleton‟s scathing

criticism of Spivak , states that Spivak‟s “... influence on Third World

feminism, Continental feminist theory, Marxist theory, subaltern

studies and the philosophy of alterity is unparalled by any living

scholar, ... she has changed the academic terrain of each of these

fields by her acute and brilliant contributions...her critical

interrogation of the political status quo in its global dimensions has

reached tens of thousands of activists and scholars.” (Eagleton). The

reason for this popularity is that while other critics and literary

theorists strive to retain a unidimensional approach, Spivak is unique

and seems like an exception, comfortably straddling feminism,

Marxism, deconstruction and post-colonialism. Not only is this an

 156

indicator of the sheer brilliance and superior intellect of Spivak, but it

is also a reminder of the “Indianness” of Spivak: that special Indian

characteristic of living with differences in a multicultural country, of

accommodating different points of view, being tolerant of different

faiths and religious practices, being exposed to different cultures,

languages, and yet, being able to steadfastly retain her own identity

and voice.

The relevance and significance of Spivak and her work lies in the

fact that rather than “recirculating received opinion” (Adorno, Minima

Moralia, 1951), she indulges in forms of activist thinking and writing.

She does not shirk from taking the risk of explicating and challenging

some of the ideas and writings that were heretofore considered

hallowed. Some instances of her bold critiquing are as follows:

 Her argument that Kant‟s “Critiques” provided some of the

rational principles for imperial expansion and justified the idea

of Western imperialism as a civilizing mission;

 Her re-reading of Marx in an attempt to deconstruct the

capitalist system of value determinations, as well as to

 157

articulate the cultural, political and economic conditions which

silence the „Third World‟ woman;

 Her criticism of Western feminism and her argument that

Western feminism has been historically complicit in the project

of imperialist expansion since it had the dangerous tendency of

repeating the colonial attitudes of nineteenth-century bourgeois

female individualism towards „Third World‟ women;

 Her commitment to set deconstruction to work outside the

academic disciplinary framework of literary criticism and

philosophy into the field of global economic and political

relations which can be seen as a movement from ethics to

politics;

 Her critique of the Subaltern Studies Collective and her

writings on subaltern women‟s histories which radically

challenge the terms and categories of political identity and

struggle in contemporary thought.

Spivak‟s use of diverse theoretical methodologies, and her effortless

movement from and between various disciplines, puts her in danger of

being termed eclectic, something that Terry Eagleton and others

accuse her of being. The grounds for this perceived eclecticism are
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perhaps to be found in Spivak‟s own thinking and writing as she

delves into areas as diverse as graphemics, the garment industry,

migrant labour, discourse, language, identity, gender, transnationality,

Hegelian philosophy, historical archives of colonial India, Post-

Modern culture, international trade, etc., all the while using a complex

combination of methodologies to intervene, interrogate, and explicate

pertinent issues and ideas. Given below some instances that may

tempt us to label Spivak as eclectic:

 The supposed contradiction between her “materialist

commitment” to work with the disenfranchised groups of the

„Third World‟, while at the same time using a language that can

be „difficult and theoretical‟, and also her use of a complex

methodology like deconstruction to achieve this goal;

 Her criticism of the Subaltern Studies historians‟ practice of

revisionist historical writing as being at odds with their

methodology, and her own deconstructive and feminist reading

of the Subaltern Studies historians‟ Marxist methodology;

 Her reading of Marx through the lens of deconstruction; and,

 Her use of subaltern women‟s histories to challenge the

universal claims of European feminism

 159

However, through a careful and patient reading of Spivak, this

study contends and concludes that Spivak‟s body of writing is

syncretic rather than eclectic. This contention is justified as

follows:

 Spivak‟s use of deconstruction in her engagement with

Third World disenfranchised/subaltern groups may seem

like a contradiction, one cannot ignore the tremendous

influence that Derrida‟s deconstruction of „Western

philosophical truth‟ and the „Western humanist subject‟ and

its ethical dimensions has had on the development of her

postcolonialist thought, reading practices, and counter-

global development activism.

 By critiquing the methodology of the subaltern Studies

Collective, and by using deconstruction, Spivak has

produced a more nuanced account of historiography that not

only includes women but also produces a better reading

strategy that responds to the voices and unwritten histories

of subaltern women, without representing them.

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 Spivak‟s deconstructive reading of Marx has helped

articulate the cultural, political and economic conditions

which silence and oppress the Third World women.

 Spivak‟s emphasis on the use of “Strategic Essentialism” for

rethinking feminist thought from the perspective of different

non-western women‟s lives and histories is perhaps one of

the best examples of her syncreticism.

For Spivak, a strategy is something that suits a situation; a

strategy is not a theory. She therefore uses deconstruction as a

strategy in feminism to counter the sanctioned ignorance of western

academic paradigms towards Third World women, and also by

emphasizing the importance of a “global” political awareness of the

“local” economic, political, social and cultural conditions that

structure women‟s oppression in different parts of the world.

Much like Derrida, it is the ethical dimension that is most

important in Spivak‟s work and manifests itself in her critique of

Marxism, Feminism, Subaltern Studies and Post-colonialism as she

describes the "painstaking labour" required "to establish ethical

singularity with the subaltern" (Devi. “Imaginary Maps”,1995).

 161

Spivak is definitely not an armchair critic and her critical

interventions are not conducted for the sake of disinterested

theoretical speculation. She is propelled by the affirmative mode of

deconstruction “to work outside the academic disciplinary framework

of literary criticism and philosophy in a wider field of global

economic and political relations”. Her personal 'field work' from the

year 1986, in the remote rural districts of Birbhum in West Bengal,

that includes funding and teacher training programs, is a testimony to

this. As she states in "A Note on the New International", "Real, mind

changing formations of collectivity, that will withstand and survive

victory, is incredibly slow and time-consuming work, with no

guarantees" (“A Note on the New International”, parallax, 7, (3)

(2001): 12-16). It is for this kind of work that Spivak was honoured

with the prestigious Kyoto Prize in arts and Philosophy by the Inamori

Foundation, in the field of thought and ethics, for speaking against

„intellectual colonialism‟. As the Prize Committee stated, “She

exemplifies what intellectuals today should be through her theoretical

work for the humanities and her devotion to multifaceted educational

activities. Her relentless efforts to elucidate the structure of

oppression, which is rarely visualized in modern society, and to fulfil

 162

her ethical responsibilities as an intellectual are attracting profound

empathy and respect, both within academic circles and among a wider

international audience.”

The significance and relevance of Spivak's work therefore is her

political commitment to learn to learn from the subaltern and thus

achieve a relation of ethical singularity with the subaltern. Whoever

we are, if we are reading Spivak, we are likely to be a privileged lot in

terms of educational opportunity, location, etc. "Unlearning one's

privilege as one's loss" which is one of the most powerful tasks set

about for readers by Spivak's writing and teaching, constitutes a

recognition that our privileges in terms of race, class, nationality, or

gender may have prevented us from gaining a certain kind of Other

knowledge (that which we are not equipped to understand because of

our social position. "Unlearning" would also mean attempting to

speak to those Others in such a manner that they take us seriously and

are able to answer back. In her speech after being awarded the Kyoto

Prize, Spivak spoke of the satisfaction she gets from gaining the trust

of some of the poorest people in West Bengal, where illiteracy

remains high. The land for a second school structure had been

donated by a group of illiterate people from the community who had

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no land to cultivate. “My kind – although my parents were

anticasteists – has oppressed these people over thousands of years.

It‟s a small repayment of ancestral debt that I have earned their trust.”

Spivak exhorts the 'privileged' to "develop a certain degree of rage

against the history that has written such an abject script for you, that

you are silenced". To unlearn our privilege means to do our

homework, to work hard at gaining some knowledge of the others

who occupy those spaces mostly closed to our privileged view. Doing

one's homework in the interests of unlearning one's privilege is what

signifies the beginning of an ethical relation to the Other.

It is this strong and radiating ethical centre which is at the core

of her work that upholds her well-earned popularity and her

undisputed importance. For her, Ethics is not a problem of

Knowledge but a call of relationship. Thinking of the ethical relation

as an embrace, an act of love, in which each learns from the other, is

not the same thing as wanting to speak 'for' an oppressed constituency.

When she says that the subaltern cannot speak, what she means is that

the subaltern cannot be heard by the privileged. If the subaltern were

able to make herself heard, her status as a subaltern would be changed

entirely and she would cease to be subaltern. That, according to

 164

Spivak, is the goal of the ethical relation; that the subaltern, the most

oppressed and invisible of constituencies might cease to exist.

_______________________________________________________
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